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'HILMA AF KLINT: PAINTINGS FOR THE FUTURE' at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through April 23). This rapturous exhibition upends Modernism's holiest genesis tale that the male trinity of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian invented abstract painting starting in 1913. It demonstrates that a female Swedish artist got there first (1906 7), in great style and a radically bold scale with paintings that feel startlingly contemporary. The mother of all revisionist shows regarding Modernism. (Roberta Smith) 212 423 3500, guggenheim.org 'LUCIO FONTANA: ON THE THRESHOLD' at the Met Breuer (through April 14). The art of this Argentine Italian modernist looks a bit like it comes from another planet, and it might as well, given how seldom we see it in New York. The Met Breuer show, with single environments at the Met Fifth Avenue and El Museo del Barrio, is the artist's first museum survey here in over 40 years. This wouldn't be especially notable plenty of his Latin American peers never get seen at all were Fontana, who died in 1968, not so influential a figure. The "threshold" in the title refers not only to the early phase of his career, which the Met Breuer exhibition highlights, but also to his position as a forebear of contemporary art as we know it. Things we take for granted installation, new media and the poly disciplinary impulse that defines so many 21st century careers Fontana pioneered in the 1950s. (Holland Cotter) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Jason Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'FRIDA KAHLO: APPEARANCES CAN BE DECEIVING' at the Brooklyn Museum (through May 12). This is not exactly an exhibition of Kahlo's art it contains just 11 paintings, from compelling self portraits to ghastly New Age kitsch but an evocation of an artistic life through her elegant Oaxacan blouses and skirts, not to mention the corsets and spinal braces she wore after a crippling traffic accident. Do her outfits have the weight of art, or are they just so much biographical flimflam? Your answer may vary depending on your degree of Fridamania, but the woven shawls and color saturated long skirts here, as well as gripping photographs of the artist by Carl Van Vechten, Imogen Cunningham, Manuel Alvarez Bravo and other great shutterbugs, suggest Kahlo's real accomplishment was a Duchampian extension of her art far beyond the easel, into her home, her fashion and her public relationships. (Farago) 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org 'THE LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art. The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person's game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'MONUMENTAL JOURNEY: THE DAGUERREOTYPES OF GIRAULT DE PRANGEY' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through May 12). This exhibition is a buffed jewel. In 1842, just a couple of years after Louis Daguerre unveiled the world's first practical camera, Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey, a French aristocrat with a yen for experimental technology, set off on a three year road trip, lugging a 100 pound kit as he took the world's first photographs of Athens, Cairo, Constantinople and Jerusalem. More than 100 of Girault de Prangey's precise daguerreotypes glisten here under pin lights, and his systematic photos of Islamic architecture, in particular, express how the new technology of photography could flit between art and science, and would soon become a tool of colonial rule. Girault de Prangey's daguerreotypes were little seen before 2003, when his descendants put them on the market; their discovery was a landmark in the history of early photography, and this show is too. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'R.H. QUAYTMAN: X, CHAPTER 34' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through April 23). At the summit the Guggenheim's spiraling rotunda, this show appears as if the exhibition of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, on the floors below, had suddenly exploded into 28 fragments. Quaytman made this series of works in 2018 in response to af Klint's oeuvre from the last century, and Quaytman is the perfect artist to answer af Klint: Af Klint worked in series, and Quaytman works in what she calls "chapters." Where af Klint took orders from spirits she claimed to have contacted through seances, Quaytman, for this project, has adopted af Klint as her higher power, working in a more secular, channeled collaborative vein. And where af Klint offers a bright, dynamic symphony, Quaytman responds with a spare, restrained and slightly dissonant tone poem. (Martha Schwendener) 212 423 3575, guggenheim.org 'BETYE SAAR: KEEPIN' IT CLEAN' at the New York Historical Society (through May 27). Saar has been making important and influential work for nearly 60 years. Yet no big New York museum has given her a full retrospective, or even a significant one person show, since a 1975 solo at the Whitney Museum of American Art. As this exhibition demonstrates, the institutional oversight is baffling, as her primary themes racial justice and feminism (her 1972 breakthrough piece, "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima," merges the two by transforming the racist stereotype of the smiling black mammy into an armed freedom fighter) are exactly attuned to the present. (Cotter) 212 873 3400, nyhistory.org 'SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION' at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilettantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'TOLKIEN: MAKER OF MIDDLE EARTH' at the Morgan Library Museum (through May 12). J. R. R. Tolkien did more than write books like "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy; he invented an alternate reality, complete with its own geography, languages, religion and an era spanning history. This exhibition of his artwork, letters, drafts and other material reminds visitors that the stories Tolkien wrote, however impressive, represent only a fraction of his efforts, and it highlights his unparalleled ability to create an immersive experience using only words and pictures. After a visit you, too, may find yourself believing in Middle earth and the hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs and wizards that live there. (Peter Libbey) 212 685 0008, themorgan.org 'VOICE OF MY CITY: JEROME ROBBINS AND NEW YORK' at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (through March 30). The choreographer of "West Side Story" and "Fiddler on the Roof" was born a little over 100 years ago, but this exhibition is so much more than a centenary obligation; it's an openhearted, deeply moving showcase of Robbins's work, notes and diaries, full of the joy and anxiety of postwar Manhattan. Robbins, born Jerry Rabinowitz, made creditable paintings and drawings as a teenager, and in his 20s he hit it big with "Fancy Free," set to a syncopated score by Leonard Bernstein, and evoked here through original footage and Robbins's sketches of jumping and prancing seamen. He bullied dancers, and infuriated friends when he testified before the House Un American Activities Committee, but his engrossing journals, rich with watercolors and watery notes to self, reveal the intense self doubt that his choreography obscured. What Robbins loved most was New York, the city that was his muse and his helpmeet and that has been transformed beyond recognition from the days of Jets and Sharks. (Farago) 917 275 6975, nypl.org 'ANDY WARHOL FROM A TO B AND BACK AGAIN' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through March 31). Although this is the artist's first full American retrospective in 31 years, he's been so much with us in museums, galleries, auctions as to make him, like wallpaper, like the atmosphere, only half noticed. The Whitney show restores him to a full, commanding view, but does so in a carefully shaped and edited way, with an emphasis on very early and late work. Despite the show's monumentalizing size, it's a human scale Warhol we see. Largely absent is the artist entrepreneur who is taken as a prophet of our market addled present. What we have instead is Warhol for whom art, whatever else it was, was an expression of personal hopes and fears. (Cotter) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'STERLING RUBY: CERAMICS' at the Museum of Art and Design (through March 17). Adept at most art mediums, this artist is at his best in ceramics, especially in the outsize, awkwardly hand built, resplendently glazed baskets, ashtrays and plates and the objects that verge on sculpture in this show. These works actively incorporate accident and aspects of the ready made, have precedents in the large scale ceramics of Peter Voulkos and Viola Frey, but may be closest in spirit to the Neo Expressionism of Julian Schnabel rehabilitated, of course. (Smith) 212 299 7777, madmuseum.org
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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The sign over the door of the Lunt Fontanne Theater reads "Wonka Chocolate Factory." But at the concession stands inside, there are no Wonka Bars to be found. As a musical adaptation of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" settles in for an extended run on Broadway, the candy at the center of Roald Dahl's perennial children's best seller has gone missing, vanished in a haze of marketing missteps, shifting strategies and corporate indifference. "For the first time in decades," said Luke Kelly, Mr. Dahl's grandson and managing director of his literary estate, "there is no Wonka candy at all." Gone are the gobstoppers and swudge of Dahl's imagination, as well as the milk chocolate bars filled with graham cracker pieces that for a time were manufactured under the Wonka label. The theater has plenty of candy for sale Dylan Lauren (daughter of Ralph) of Dylan's Candy Bar, is curating an assortment of sweet treats but none with the Wonka name, because Wonka branded candy no longer exists in the United States or Britain. "It's a real tragedy," said Jason Liebig, who collects candy memorabilia and calls himself a confectionary historian. "I want Willy Wonka branded candy it's such a fun fount of material to draw from, and certainly it's ingrained in our popular culture. How many candy brands get to be built on such a rich world?" The Wonka bar was born in Dahl's imagination, inspired by a chapter in his childhood when, while studying at a British boarding school, he was invited to test Cadbury chocolates. His fantasies about chocolate factories later led him to write the book, which tells the story of an ingenious but eccentric candymaker, Willy Wonka, whose treats were treasured by an imaginative and impoverished boy, Charlie Bucket. The novel, released in the United States in 1964, was adapted into "Willy Wonka the Chocolate Factory," a 1971 film starring Gene Wilder, and that's when the imaginary Wonka Bar became a reality. The film was financed by Quaker Oats, which put up 3 million for the project, persuaded by an entrepreneurial producer, David L. Wolper, who suggested the food company could use the film to promote a candy line it was planning. The effort was not especially successful. The film's initial reception was tepid. And Quaker Oats struggled with developing a chocolate bar. As the first Wonka Bars were shipped across the country, many of them turned to mush; their melting point was too low. "The candy bar collapsed, but the movie ultimately succeeded," said Mark Wolper, the son of Mr. Wolper and president of the Wolper Organization, which continues to produce shows and movies. The Wonka brand passed from company to company in a wave of late 20th century corporate mergers and acquisitions, and along the way came a real world Wonka Bar, Peanut Butter Oompas, Everlasting Gobstoppers and other candies. In 1993 Nestle, a Swiss conglomerate, acquired the Wonka name from a British candymaker, Rowntree Mackintosh Confectionery, and, for a time, nurtured the Wonka brand, which eventually encompassed candies including SweeTarts, Nerds and Laffy Taffy, followed by Wonka Exceptionals. But the entire Wonka line has since been discontinued. Nestle has been hoping "to refocus the magic of Wonka toward future product offerings around the world," according to Roz O'Hearn, a company spokeswoman. "We're considering a variety of options, but for now, our innovation plans remain confidential, so I cannot share more info." Offerings from Dylan's Candy Bar at the Lunt Fontanne Theater. Krista Schlueter for The New York Times But, complicating matters for the Wonka brand, Nestle is under pressure to restructure. In June, the company said it would try to sell its United States candy business, a reaction to Americans' eating less candy. Just days later, an activist hedge fund manager revealed a major stake in Nestle and called on the company to shake itself up. The disappearance of the Wonka Bar is a frustration for producers of the musical, an early version of which ran for nearly four years in London. On Broadway, where it opened in April, it has been playing to packed houses it grossed an impressive 1.3 million during the week that ended June 25 despite negative reviews. Fully aware that patrons would be curious to taste Wonka's wares, the producers managed to sell Wonka bars from the concession stands when the show first opened in London in 2013, because Nestle was again making Wonka candy at a European plant. But there wasn't much appetite for the candy outside the theater. "It landed with a thud," said Kevin McCormick, an executive vice president of Warner Bros. Pictures and a lead producer of the Broadway musical. "There were adult flavors like creme brulee, which were nice, but no Wonka bar it wasn't the way people remembered it." Nestle soon stopped the manufacturing. "They didn't want to be in the candy business they wanted to be in water and baby formula," Mr. McCormick said. When the musical sold out its stash, that was it. "At the last performance in London, I sat there as kids kept going up to people selling ice cream and saying, 'Can I get a Wonka bar?'" Mr. McCormick recalled. "I said, 'We can't let this happen again.'" When a revamped version of the show came to Broadway (opening song: "The Candy Man"), there was no Wonka product to be found. As an alternative, the show's publicists at one point sent journalists Hershey bars camouflaged as Wonka bars sheathed in gold foil with a purple outer wrapper. Ms. Lauren, who happens to be a longtime fan of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and created some candy to celebrate the centennial of Dahl's birth, was hired by the theater to capture the spirit, if not the exact substance, of Wonka's factory. Tushar Adya, chief operating officer at Dylan's, said, "Back in the day, when the Wonka Bar was made by Nestle, it was one of the No. 1 sellers in our stores." Even today, Mr. Adya said, customers routinely ask for Wonka Bars at Dylan's shops around the country. So, inside the Lunt Fontanne on West 46th Street, a pop up Dylan's store dominates the lobby. There is a lot of winking to Willy the Dylan's chocolate bars have golden wrappers; there are golden ticket souvenirs on offer, and the shop's bags are purple (the color of Wonka's topcoat) with a big golden W. Candy fans are still hoping for a comeback. "The flavor was unique and delightful and the wrapping was appealing," said Elly Marie, a student in Adelaide, Australia, who talks about her passions on an internet forum for candy aficionados. "I certainly miss them!"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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In this week's issue, Charles McGrath interviews Philip Roth about his career and America's strange political moment. In 1959, William Peden reviewed "Goodbye, Columbus," Roth's first book and the one that would establish the young writer from Newark. Read an excerpt below: Some years ago, in the vanguard of the Southern literary renascence, Ellen Glasgow commented that what the South needed was "blood and irony." The same might be said of some recent writers who have concerned themselves with depicting the role of the Jew in American society, which is the subject of Philip Roth's collection of short stories and a novella. An English instructor at the University of Chicago, 26 year old Mr. Roth has published fiction in Harper's, The Paris Review, The New Yorker and other periodicals. "Goodbye, Columbus," a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, is his first book, and an impressive one. There is blood here and vigor, love and hate, irony and compassion. Mr. Roth's novella is a somewhat incongruous mingling of conventional boy meets girl material and portrait of the intellectual as a young man, narrated with an occasional fondness for clinical detail reminiscent of Edmund Wilson's "The Princess With the Golden Hair." Young Neil Klugman meets beautiful, wealthy Brenda Patimkin, a Radcliffe undergraduate. Neil pursues Brenda with the determination of a well trained bird dog, and soon catches her. After a summer love affair, he rejects Brenda and the nouveau riche Patimkins with the smug self righteousness of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus. Such a summary, however, does justice neither to the author nor to his people; out of such hackneyed materials Mr. Roth has written a perceptive, often witty and frequently moving piece of fiction. He is a good story teller, a shrewd appraiser of character and a keen recorder of an indecisive generation. Most of Mr. Roth's protagonists are, like Neil Klugman, adrift in a limbo between past and present. The author seems to know his people inside and out, whether he writes of a boy arguing the Virgin Birth with an exasperated rabbi, ("The Conversion of the Jews"), or, in "Eli, the Fanatic," of a young Jewish lawyer trying to explain suburban mores to the leader of a rabbinical orphanage, or, in "Epstein," of the ludicrous yet pitiable aftermath of an aging man's search for love. These stories, though concerned with universal, archetypal experiences, are somewhat transmuted into that which is at once strange and familiar. "I'm a Jew," one character says. "I am different. Better, maybe not. But different."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Now I feel starved because there's virtually no chance of negotiation. People can look at one another from a distance, and that's it. We can come no closer. Though this is happening everywhere in the country, in Los Angeles it feels like a cruel joke, a deliberate upending of our delicate ritual of interrelating. That's not all that has been upended. At the risk of seeming like a Los Angeles caricature, I confess that I also walk to be seen. I walk to catch someone's eye, even if I don't talk to that person or if the standard distance between us doesn't close at all. Because a look can close a distance, and that often feeds me enough; it can restore my faith, if it happens to be waning for some reason. Much can be achieved in a look equilibrium, agreement, mutual admiration. In a city that operates on minimal contact, this kind of exchange is vital. It makes sense then that contrary to what I expected, I prepare myself each day in a way I haven't for the past five years or so. As a freelancer working at home, I was typically scattershot about such preparation, like lots of gig economy people here who seem to live in sweats or glorified pajamas. Suddenly, though, I feel compelled to put on a face each day dress in a real outfit, arrange my hair, put on a bit of makeup, even though I don't have plans to meet with anyone. I feel a determination to meet whatever opportunity remains out there in this sad, strange time with as pleasant and ready a face as possible. Even if I ultimately have only myself as company along with the six dogs I continue to walk every day, in various parts of town I feel better about the isolation if I look good. The truth is, I need to feel better about it, need to pretty up the bleakness and the association with disease that aloneness has assumed. I need to make my aloneness more hopeful, at least on the surface. I think it's paying off. I walked my dogs yesterday in a small, overwhelmingly white community near the ocean. I walk there a lot but as a black woman, I normally feel quite isolated. People I encounter don't tend to catch my eye or exploit any opportunity for connection, whatever my appearance. In this part of town I've gotten used to a certain invisibility. Yesterday, though, a man called to me from across the street, his voice friendly but also urgent. A woman waved vigorously. A girl leaned out of the window of a passing car that had a sign taped to the passenger door: We Love You. "Love" was written within a bright red heart. The leaning girl looked me in the eye and smiled, in a meaningful way. I straightened up and smiled back, meaningfully. Though she was moving away from me in the opposite direction, she we were closing the distance. 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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EVERY now and then when a new furnished model would open at Meadowbrook Pointe, an age restricted condominium community of flats, town houses and villas in Westbury that will eventually have 720 units, Carol Uffer would stroll over from her two bedroom villa within the complex to take a look. "I was not thinking about moving," said Ms. Uffer, a retired New York City school principal, who bought her 645,000 duplex with a loft and its own garage in 2007, a year after construction began at Meadowbrook Pointe. "I just went to see it." The new two bedroom model was larger than hers and all on one level, with a dining room and a small den. It was "laid out differently," and it appealed to Ms. Uffer, whose unit had only an eat in area in the kitchen. When her eight grandchildren come over for dinner, she has to move furniture. She asked the in house sales office to list her villa and bought the larger unit for 850,000. She plans to move to the new building as soon as she sells the place she's in, updated with a new kitchen and listed at 659,000. "The new unit is beautiful," Ms. Uffer said, "and my needs have changed." She gave up her second home in Florida three years ago to be near her family on the Island full time; and she no longer relishes stairs. "Since I had the opportunity, I decided to take it." She has thereby joined the ranks of those reselling homes in communities that haven't yet even been fully built out. Construction has proceeded at a snail's pace ever since the downturn in 2008, so it is perhaps inevitable that such resales have cropped up. The phenomenon is the opposite of what it used to be before the bubble burst. Then, residential developments went up quickly but never quickly enough to impede resellers in their quest to "flip" purchases for even higher asking prices. When the market was good, during the year to 18 months a contracted home was under construction, "the project would sell out and they could sell for a profit," said Michael Dubb, the principal and founder of the Beechwood Organization, the developer of Meadowbrook Pointe. These days, sellers of resales are likely to take a hit while buyers of resales in unfinished communities pay less than for new units. Mr. Dubb says about 100 units have yet to be built. Of the 15 condos at the gated clubhouse community that have been listed as resales, most were, like Ms. Uffer's, trade ins for larger units. Construction at Westhampton Pines, a 189 unit age restricted community in Westhampton, began in 2005. Bruce Orr, the senior vice president for sales and marketing of Timber Ridge Homes, the developer, said there were 14 homes left to sell, with 6 not yet started and 2 resales on the market. "The pace is definitely off, due to the housing market collapse in 2008 and the very slow recovery over the last two years," Mr. Orr said, adding that resales had averaged three to six a year. The resales have traction because of "price or delivery time frame," he said, though "most people prefer a new home because they can select all of the interior features that they want, versus buying a resale where they must accept the interior features that someone else selected." New homes, which go up in five months, range from 585,000 to 650,000 depending on the floor plan, he said; resale listings start at 575,000. At Courthouse Commons, a Timber Ridge clubhouse style development in Central Islip that began construction in 2006, 46 out of 252 units remain to be sold, and 5 resales are listed. New construction ranges from 220,000 to 270,000 depending on the floor plan. Resales on the market range from 200,000 to 220,000. Mr. Dubb said that buyers opting for resales over new construction were doing "better on the price of the resale, but they are giving up warranty, customer service, the experience of a brand new home, customizing and picking all the upgrades," from flooring to plumbing fixtures and tile. "We are not in the business of recustomizing homes for people," he added. Judy Fruitbine, an associate broker with Shawn Elliott Luxury Homes Estates with a 1.299 million listing at the Chatham, a gated North Hills community of 144 luxury town houses, described resales as "really tough" in communities where the developer is still selling. "The problem is that the sponsor is in a position that he can cut deals that many times are less than what people that bought before are in there for," Ms. Fruitbine said. "He throws in extras that people had to pay extra for." When the market was rising, she added, "it was better to buy a resale because they had everything done to it, they already paid for the upgrade." In the decade since construction began at the Chatham, a "good number" of the 86 homes built during its first phase have turned over, said Chad Gessin, vice president for design and construction of the Chatham Development Company, the developer. Construction recently began on the last 10 units, with 4 still on the market, ranging from 1.2 million to nearly 1.4 million.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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The hard working lizard, trudging back to wide release in North American theaters for a fifth time in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters," managed to sell about 49 million in tickets over the weekend, enough for first place. But the Legendary Entertainment sequel will nonetheless go down as the first big budget disappointment of Hollywood's summer season. "King of the Monsters" cost at least 170 million to make, not including 100 million (plus) in global marketing costs. Initial ticket sales in the United States and Canada fell behind those for its series predecessor by 47 percent, according to Comscore data. Critics were not kind. "Beyond the awesome destruction, it's not easy to build the character, story, emotion the glue that sustains a series when it's all about the monster," said David A. Gross, who runs Franchise Entertainment Research, a movie consultancy. But there is no rest for the weary in today's franchise fixated film business, in part because monsters still draw big crowds overseas, where Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah and pals collected about 130 million over the weekend. "Godzilla vs. Kong" has already been scheduled for release in March.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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From left, Nell Benjamin, Casey Nicholaw, Tina Fey and Jeff Richmond on the set of "Mean Girls" on Broadway at the August Wilson Theater. There are nights lately at the August Wilson Theater when the audience feels, to the creators of the musical comedy "Mean Girls," like it's full of Gretchens. Not people named Gretchen, that is, but rather people who identify with Gretchen, the most insecure member of the Plastics the ruthless high school clique that rules the show, just as it rules the movie that inspired it. For those only vaguely familiar, Gretchen is the Plastic who keeps trying to make "fetch" happen. But in the musical with a book by Tina Fey, adapted from her 2004 screenplay, which in turn is inspired by Rosalind Wiseman's book "Queen Bees and Wannabes" Gretchen also gets a poignant solo called "What's Wrong With Me?," the kind of emotional moment that just doesn't appear in the film. It was one of the first songs that the composer Jeff Richmond ("Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt"), who is married to Ms. Fey, and the lyricist Nell Benjamin ("Legally Blonde," the musical) wrote for the show. Directed by the Tony Award winner Casey Nicholaw ("The Book of Mormon") and opening on April 8, the musical is Ms. Fey's Broadway debut. Though she is not reprising her film role as the teacher Ms. Norbury, caretaker of the mathletes, the gang's all here: the vicious queen bee Regina George (and her wannabe cool mom, Mrs. George); the dim bulb Karen; the artsy outsiders Janis and Damian; and Cady, the previously home schooled central character, who's not doing so well at navigating the social land mines of high school life. Last November, when the musical made its premiere at the National Theater in Washington, D.C., the Washington Post critic Peter Marks wrote that it felt "less like an artistic reinvention than a commercial knockoff." Since then, its creators who, with the exception of Ms. Fey and Mr. Richmond, did not know one another before the project began have been busy with fixes, including five new songs. "We ripped the show completely apart from D.C.," Mr. Nicholaw said. Early on a snowy evening in the second week of previews, they straggled into a steakhouse down the block from the theater, ordered coffee like the night owls that they are and talked about bringing "Mean Girls" to Broadway. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. What are the pitfalls in adapting from screen to stage? CASEY NICHOLAW The biggest mistake is when you're like, "We have to give the fans everything they want." The fact that Tina didn't want to do that was a huge relief to me. All of us inherently know what's theatrical and what needs to be onstage. NELL BENJAMIN There are some people who are like, "Is there going to be a song called 'Fetch'?" But if you think it through, how long do you want to sit in a song that's based on one really good joke? RICHMOND We had a ridiculous idea for a moment where the entire curtain call was going to be a medley of the songs you thought would be in it, all the iconic moments. Like "Fetch" and "On Wednesdays We Wear Pink" and what's the one about sluts? How do you make a musical that pits girls against girls at a time when the culture is more excited about female unity than we've ever seen? FEY It is interesting. Since the film, we have ostensibly more female unity. But we also have trouble, right? We have white feminism and intersectional feminism. We have women not believing women. But it also does feel like the message of the show has expanded beyond just relational aggression among females, and it's sort of about relational aggression, which has metastasized in many ways. BENJAMIN It's not just girls being mean to girls. It's whoever's on top thinking it's O.K. to push downhill. Right now, people are deeply impressed with the youth of America. Does that impact the show? FEY It does. We talk about it. We have a new song at the top of the second act called "Stop." It's sort of a comedic song about impulse control, and Nell and I are both so mindful about making sure that it's not judging just girls for the choices they make. In some ways, it makes sense that our heroine by the end of the show is living her authentic life and being her best self that she is teaching us. The musical feels kinder than the movie. FEY I think that partly is the form, because once you hear people sing, then you're in their hearts. I always felt empathy for Gretchen in the movie and for Cady, for all of them. But I think it's because of music. NICHOLAW It sweetens everything up whether you want it to or not. BENJAMIN I can't not like a person I'm going to write a song for. NICHOLAW We try to make sure that we undercut the sweet as much as we can. BENJAMIN And sneak the message in. Does having kids, maybe daughters in particular, affect your writing at all? FEY When I first got Rosalind to license the book to us, I sort of promised her that we would honor the intention, which was to be helpful. We've carried that through. BENJAMIN At 5, my daughter is already not on board for lectures. I have a lot that I want to say to her, but I cannot lecture her. In that respect it's probably improved my writing, because I'm like, how am I going to work around a 5 year old's defenses? It better be funny. I wasn't thinking of the messaging so much as the tenderness of the show. It made me wonder if you're writing more tenderly. FEY A moment of the show that has finally come to work, something that we struggled with, was the way we use Mrs. George just wanting to represent a mother and acknowledge that grown women are judgmental of each other, too, and that we as the audience look at this character in the first act like: Oh, she's a clown. And just wanting to find a way to empathize with her. That was important to me especially, and that is, yes, probably because I am a mother now, and when I wrote the movie I was not. There's a poster outside the theater with photos of your little awkward slash adorable adolescent selves. Nerds are very dear to the show's heart, it seems. FEY It's brought me so much joy, how much audiences have responded to the mathletes segment. I think embracing nerdery is what Cady does in a way. She embraces a part of herself that is not perceived to be cool. That's at the core of the story. FEY With the exception of Regina, every other character believes themselves to be an underdog in some way. NICHOLAW Everyone can relate to that, especially in high school. How I coped was doing musicals. I was a gay kid that couldn't come out because it was 1979, and I didn't fit in anywhere and I didn't like sports and I was called all kinds of things. So I found theater, and I found where I did belong. Damian is like a valentine to every drama nerd who ever was. RICHMOND Yeah. There's this meta thing going on, too, because in the movie, you don't get to see Damian actually in that world. You know he cares about it, but now you see the Damian within a musical theater structure who loves musical theater. BENJAMIN And makes it happen wherever he goes. What difference to your writing comes from having the audience in the room with you? FEY It's super helpful. You can take your own sense of humor as a guide for only so long, and then you've got to get it up in front of an audience. This is so much more alive, to have the chance every night to adjust things. RICHMOND It's also so much more rewarding. When you're doing television, you don't see the people who are enjoying your thing. I find myself spending so much time watching people in the audience. NICHOLAW I spend a lot of time deciding if I'm going to tell that person to stop crinkling their wrapper. RICHMOND That's why TV is better. Tina, you're the Broadway newbie. After "Mean Girls," will theater see more of you? FEY I would love to. Maybe we have to come up with something wholly original. But this process has been a joy. I know enough, just peripherally, to know that it could have been a bad arranged marriage, so I feel really very lucky.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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PARIS More than half of the 48 looks Veronique Nichanian showed for her fall 2016 Hermes men's wear collection staged against the inky blue night sky of Paris as seen through the glass walled Maison de la Radio were worn with sneakers in Hermes orange. The high end trainers are a new introduction at the luxury leather goods house founded as a saddlery to the French carriage trade. Five of the first looks at Alessandro Sartori's show for Berluti staged in the gilded Pavillon de Marsan at the Louvre Musee des Arts Decoratifs included thick soled brogue trainers or formal shoes brought down a peg with topstitched patterns created by Scott Campbell, a New York City tattoo artist with a super celebrity phone tree. Virtually everything that the designer Kris Van Assche presented in his Dior Homme show staged in a swank tennis club founded in 1895 drew inspiration from clothes inspired by street style, the kind of utility garb the skate rats who hang out around Supreme tend to wear.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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The nation's top cellphone carriers Verizon, AT T, T Mobile and Sprint all said Tuesday that they would sharply limit arrangements that give marketers and other businesses access to cellphone customers' location data, after disclosures that the information was used to track people without their consent. Verizon announced its change in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, who has been investigating location privacy issues. He had asked Verizon, AT T, Sprint and T Mobile to audit their relationships with companies that buy and sell access to consumer location data, known as location aggregators. "As a result of this review, we are initiating a process to terminate our existing agreements for the location aggregator program," Verizon's chief privacy officer, Karen Zacharia, wrote in the letter. Some data sharing, such as for fraud prevention and call routing, will continue, she wrote. An AT T spokesman, Michael Balmoris, said the company would end work with the data companies "as soon as practical in a way that preserves important, potential lifesaving services like emergency roadside assistance."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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"Entomo," by the Spanish duo of Elias Aguirre and Alvaro Esteban, was also suited to the outdoors. According to the program note, it was a kind of entomological study, and much of the detailed, twitchy movement did read as insect behavior, though on human bodies, much of the crouching and springing looked simian. The duet was antagonistic, with the two men grappling for dominance, but their attitude was cool, and a looseness in structure and energy gave the work a sketchlike quality. Elena Zahlmann of New York Theater Ballet danced "An Eccentric Beauty Revisited," a curio that James Waring made in 1972, looking back at the Belle Epoque and Nijinsky. The work mystified me when I first saw Ms. Zahlmann perform it in 2012, and revisiting it on Monday, I still found it more eccentric than beautiful, and not exaggerated enough for camp. The carnivalesque costume is striking, but I don't understand the point of the piece's collage of fussy ballet steps and jokey gestures. (Neither did the kid who yelled out, "Yay, funky chicken!") "Danzon," which the former Ballet Hispanico dancer Pedro Ruiz created for Nimbus Dance Works in 2011, is like Ballet Hispanico pieces of old: handsome, lively, artistically unadventurous. The Nimbus dancers struggled too much with the choreography for its ballroom duets with pointed toes to yield their full pleasures, but the dancers, all in white with flashes of bold color on the undersides of the women's skirts, did make another pretty picture as the sun set: not a blinding vision, but a pleasant one on an evening in August.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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The word "scientist" does not specify a gender. And yet, for eons well, ever since conferences and symposiums emerged from the primordial academic soup the majority of prominent scientific speakers and panelists have been men. This phenomenon has been documented in studies and spawned many mocking monikers: "manference," "himposium," "manel." People have tried to understand why the Y chromosome so dominates the dais and explain that there really should be more X. Now, the effort to achieve better gender balance has a new high profile champion: the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis S. Collins. In a statement titled "Time to End the Manel Tradition," Dr. Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and has been N.I.H. director for a decade, said on Wednesday he would no longer speak at conferences that do not show a strong commitment to diversifying the makeup of their panelists. "I want to send a clear message of concern: It is time to end the tradition in science of all male speaking panels," Dr. Collins wrote. "Starting now," he added, "when I consider speaking invitations, I will expect a level playing field, where scientists of all backgrounds are evaluated fairly for speaking opportunities. If that attention to inclusiveness is not evident in the agenda, I will decline to take part. I challenge other scientific leaders across the biomedical enterprise to do the same." His announcement was applauded by scientists who have long urged speaker diversity at conferences. "I'm amazed and I'm so happy that he made this announcement," said Yael Niv, a Princeton neuroscientist, who started a website, biaswatchneuro.com, that tracks the gender balance of speakers at neuroscience conferences and measures them against the percentage of women in the field. "We've been working on this for years, and it's great to have someone who's a leading figure and a man do the same thing," Dr. Niv said. "People really want him at a conference he brings the crowds. So if he says, 'I'm not coming to your conference to give the keynote speech because I don't see adequate representation,' that is huge." Dr. Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, tweeted to Dr. Collins that he and others at his large global health nonprofit organization "agree and have made a commitment and refuse to serve on panels or talk at events that do not honor the same commitment." In an interview after his statement was released, Dr. Collins said, "Certainly white men are wonderful contributors to the biomedical enterprise I'm one of them. But at the same time, there's a tendency to neglect the fact that we have lots of other people contributing to research." Dr. Collins said he had also become "deeply concerned about the growing evidence of sexual harassment that has made the workplace in biomedicine an unfriendly place for women." In February, the N.I.H. announced that after examining allegations at more than two dozen institutions whose scientists receive agency funding, 14 principal investigators were replaced and 21 were fired or otherwise disciplined by their institutions. The agency said it also took disciplinary actions against 20 staff members. Dr. Niv said the issue of gender balance at conferences was frequently one of insufficient awareness and effort. Even women who organize conferences do not always invite more women to speak, she said, noting that her website was started in response to a conference organized by two women who invited 22 men and no women to speak. She said she often sends conferences lists of female scientists and needs to point out that they are as experienced and qualified as some of the male scientists that were invited to speak. Dr. Collins said that from now on, whenever he is asked to speak, he will say that "we want to see exactly how you handled this issue of inclusiveness please tell us what you're doing." He will ask to see the final roster 30 days before the event. Dr. Collins said he was not going to require any quota for women as speakers or direct other N.I.H. scientists to follow his example because "I would not want anybody to do this because they're forced to." He acknowledged that in some areas it might be challenging to bring in a significant number of women. "I want to be totally reasonable about that," he said. "But I want to see the effort." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Fragile clay, papier mache and other materials some tableaus are made up of hundreds of tiny pieces led to close relationships with shipping companies. Their collection will soon depart for San Francisco, a donation to the Mexican Museum, a Smithsonian affiliate scheduled to open in 2019. Below are edited excerpts from a conversation with the couple. If you two were exiled to a desert island, which work would you bring? ALAN A polychromatic clay figure by Josefina Aguilar of a mother holding the hand of one child and carrying the other. It has a lovely simplicity. TRUDY A piece by Luis Valencia Mendoza of Eve in the Garden of Eden as a single mother, without Adam. It has lovely tropical birds, and Eve seems able to go it alone. I like to muse about what the male artist was thinking. What is the most unromantic aspect of collecting Mexican folk art? ALAN These works are very fragile, and when you're unpacking, you can sense if something is broken. It's very stressful. These are one of a kind pieces. Fortunately we have a fantastic restorer.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Five years ago, New York City Ballet's fall gala became an event for fashion onstage: an annual rendezvous in which new choreography joined new couture. Since 2014, the formula has been four creations, made by four different choreographers, each with a design team from the fashion world. More recently, the new ballets have been commissioned from remarkably young choreographers. The oldest at this year's gala, on Thursday evening, was Troy Schumacher, 31; the youngest, Gianna Reisen, 18. These young dance makers in turn have brought revisions to ballet's sociology a young and liberal view of both dance and life. The cast for Mr. Schumacher's "The Wind Still Brings," designed by Jonathan Saunders, showed men and women in skirts and culottes of widely differing lengths. In Lauren Lovette's "Not Our Fate," only two of the five male dancers are white, and the others are featured in same sex couplings. Ms. Reisen's "Composer's Holiday" focuses on male female duets, framed by separate male and female corps de ballet, but it too includes a little same sex partnering. And Tsumori Chisato's wittily inventive costuming for Justin Peck's "Pulcinella Variations," with commedia dell'arte imagery filtered hilariously through postmodern and surreal lenses, includes one breathtaking outfit in which Indiana Woodward looks part ballerina and part naked; her incomplete tutu gives the impression of totally exposing one side of her body from armpit to ankle. We can and should argue about which aspects of all this are actually good, but the sheer youthfulness and anti stuffiness of Thursday's gala were most welcome. (All four pieces continue in repertory this fall.) Argument is likely to focus on the first three. Mr. Schumacher's "The Wind Still Brings," set to the last three movements of William Walton's Piano Quartet in D minor, is highly uneven. (It's also the second Schumacher creation for City Ballet during which I've wanted scissors to cut off all the loose strands flying from the costumes.) Mr. Schumacher, using 14 dancers, only occasionally persuades me that this is dance music; and he allows himself to get stuck in various ruts along the way. You see lone women traveling across the stage on point (bourrees) and dancers of both sexes lying down as if to sleep so often that they become cliches while you watch. And the costumes, in various shades of blue and mauve, generally distract. "The Wind Still Brings," though, covers a wide range of moods and structures. The sleep imagery (which at times suggests both death and sleep) is contrasted by sequences of high energy and formally geometric organization. And most of the dancers, all experienced members of the corps, have individual material that allows them to register in new ways; the full bodied adagio solo for Devin Alberda is just one of several examples in which Mr. Schumacher adds to our knowledge of a performer. There are immaturities in "Composer's Holiday" (set to Lukas Foss's "Three American Pieces for Violin and Piano"), but Ms. Reisen repeatedly shows a marvelously arresting theatrical instinct. The piece begins with a woman lifted high by three men, so that we immediately, happily, ask "What's going on here?" That sense of suspense never departs. Costumes by Virgil Abloh (of Off White) contrast with dancers in pale colors and dark ones. Even when you realize that this is mainly a vehicle for two couples the taller, elegant Christina Clark and (replacing Kennard Henson) Gilbert Bolden III, and the engagingly bright Emma Von Enck and Roman Mejia you're repeatedly surprised by how they connect with the corps (four men, four women) and one another. Ms. Lovette's "Not Our Fate" explains its title in the program quoting a 12 line rhyming poem by the dancer Mary Elizabeth Sell and yet it's a misnomer. Everyone in this ballet carries on, enjoyably, as if fate were flinging them together; one tragically rapturous embrace follows another. Michael Nyman's poundingly minimalist music is appealingly terrible; as so often with this composer, it builds the kind of rabble rousing crescendo that makes Rossini's sound demure. Black and white costumes by Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim (of MONSE and Oscar de la Renta) make men and women belong to separate eras the women in dark bodices and white, flaring skirts with attractively uneven hemlines; the men are in elegant T shirts and jeans but this disparity seems irrelevant to the ballet. Preston Chamblee and Taylor Stanley are one fatally attracted couple, Meaghan Dutton O'Hara and Ask la Cour another. Since Ms. Lovette has some compositional skill and seems to express an attractively liberal worldview onstage, I wish her work did not also seem trite. It is least so here in the dances for Ms. Dutton O'Hara, arrestingly bold and mature. Mr. Peck's "Pulcinella Variations" is in another league from these three ballets. The music is the suite from Stravinsky's narrative "Pulcinella," the work in which this modernist composer, extensively taking material from the baroque composer Pergolesi, reconnected himself back to the classical tradition. In turn it now takes Mr. Peck where he has not been before as a dance classicist. For a cast of nine, it confidently and successfully shows Mr. Peck composing classically virtuoso material that's elegant, witty and brilliant. Throughout it shows a masterfully fluent command of phraseology. And Ms. Chisato's costumes are ingenious, fabulous, outrageous. Sara Mearns and Jared Angle dance an incisively beautiful pas de deux. Winning solos for Tiler Peck and Gonzalo Garcia (as part of a longer pas de deux), Anthony Huxley, Sterling Hyltin, Brittany Pollack, Andrew Scordato and Ms. Woodward, show these dancers happily surpassing themselves in speed and finesse. You can feel the excitement it creates. I'm curious to rewatch the first three premieres, but impatient to see this again and again.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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What does it mean to be a woman of color? INTERPOSING VOICES She's got to be strong, because that's just the expectation. Loving herself, but not too much, because then she's conceited. Being his lady in the street, but his freak in the sheets. Inheriting her grandmother's love, but always loving the wrong one. Twerking for her man, but not with her friends? Being constantly told she's too much or not enough. "The most disrespected person is the black woman." Constantly having to prove she's a victim, because society sides with a man. Not being able to express her traumas, because she can't show no weakness. Is constantly told that she's too dark, too thin, too thick, too much of a bitch. Being murdered, beaten, abused, then questioned if she evoked all of it. Is left out on the street, but becomes the flower that grows from the concrete. "Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet?" She marches for everyone else, riots for everyone else, dies for everyone else. She loves for everyone else, lives for everyone else, but when it comes down to her, it ain't a BLEEP in sight. "The system as a whole has failed her. You've never been shot. You don't know her panic. Say her name. 18. Women of color."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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THE look of the Mazda 2, widely praised in the four years it has been sold around the world, offers hints of changes to come in the company's designs. It was the work of Ikuo Maeda, who is Mazda's global head of design; his father, Matasaburo Maeda, was also a designer for the company. Although the Mazda 2's look was established years ago, it anticipates some of the abstract themes at the center of a new design language called Kodo that Mr. Maeda introduced last fall with the unveiling of the Shinari concept car. At the time, Mr. Maeda said he was seeking a new sense of presence and purpose for the relatively small Japanese automaker. The Mazda 2's design was based on a contrast between soft planes and dynamic tangents, Mr. Maeda said when the car made its American debut. A similar contrast is at the root of Kodo, which is intended to embody the tension of power and speed caught in motion. The word means "soul of motion." The Mazda 2 offers its own mix of elements. Mr. Maeda says the design is "a rhythmic interplay between soft surfaces and sharp contours," or between the organic and the mechanical.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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The designer Syd Mead, who worked on movies like "Blade Runner" and "Alien," in his studio in 1986. A good Mead design looked amazing, but it also looked plausible. Syd Mead, a designer whose wide ranging work included envisioning vehicles of the future as well as helping to shape the look of environments in movies like "Blade Runner," "Tron" and "Aliens," died on Monday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 86. His spouse, Roger Servick, said the cause was lymphoma. Mr. Mead started out in the car business, designing for Ford. By 1970 he had founded his own firm, Syd Mead Inc., and had a wide range of clients, working on architectural interiors and exteriors, restaurants, catalogs and more. His first movie credit was in 1979 on "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"; he was part of the special effects team and credited as a "production illustrator." Three years later for "Blade Runner," Ridley Scott's film version of a Philip K. Dick novel about a bounty hunter who tracks down humanoid "replicants," he was "visual futurist." His other credits included "conceptual artist" on "Tron" (1982), "Aliens" (1986) and others; "vehicle designer" on "Mission to Mars" (2000); and "mask maker design" on "Mission: Impossible III" (2006). "All ideas go through three stages," he told The Boston Globe in 1985. "The first stage is the idea itself. Thinking of that is a whole specialty in itself, because if something exists someone had to think of it. "After that," he continued, "the next stage is documentation. That can be anything from a set of sketches or an oil painting to a written description to a working model. The last step is manufacture. Making it real. "Me, I'm hired to do the first two steps. I worry about the ideas, not the facts." That, though, was a bit disingenuous. Mr. Mead had a reputation for doing thorough research and making educated guesses about what was to come. A good Mead design looked amazing, but it also looked plausible. "It's believable, it's stylish, it feels like it has gone through an evolutionary process to reach this design level," Steven Lisberger, the director of "Tron," said in the trailer for "Visual Futurist: The Art and Life of Syd Mead," a 2006 documentary by Joaquin Montalvan. "And the only place it has done that evolutionary process is in Syd's head." Sydney Jay Mead was born on July 18, 1933, in St. Paul, Minn., to Kenneth and Margaret Mead. His mother was a homemaker, and his father was a Baptist preacher, which meant the family moved frequently. Mr. Mead graduated from high school in Colorado Springs. He served three years in the Army, stationed in Okinawa, then in 1959 graduated from the Art Center School of Los Angeles (now the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena) and went to work at Ford's Advanced Styling Studio, where designers were exploring what cars of the future might look like. Some of his ideas were later seen in the Ford Falcon Futura, introduced in 1961. After two years at Ford he did design work for various other companies, including United States Steel, before forming Syd Mead Inc. Philips Electronics was among his new firm's biggest clients. "His drawings for Philips Electronics in the mid '70s featured magnetic preprogrammed learning capsules for junior college students," Los Angeles magazine wrote in 2006, "and a three dimensional home entertainment system that, had it ever been developed, might have proved superior to today's high definition TV." He also designed the interiors of private jets for rich clients, a futuristic look for a 2016 fashion show, and the food court of the Eventi Hotel in Chelsea (a future that didn't last long; it was replaced two years after it opened in 2010). In his movie work Mr. Mead was perhaps most often identified with "Blade Runner," which depicted a bleak future. Mr. Servick, though, said that was an interpretation of someone else's vision, not Mr. Mead's own. "He always tried to make sure that people knew that was not his idea of the future, that was Philip K. Dick's idea of the future," he said. Mr. Mead's view was considerably more optimistic. "What we need to do," Mr. Servick said, summarizing it, "is work toward a better future, spend our efforts trying to make things better."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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The death of the Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput, who came to prominence in romantic hero roles in film and television, has resulted in an outpouring of remembrances in India from leaders and actors alike. On Twitter, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called Rajput "a bright young actor gone too soon." Ekta Kapoor, a television producer who was credited with launching Rajput's television career, posted an emotional video tribute. And Rajput's idol, the actor Shah Rukh Khan, wrote, "I will miss him so much." Rajput's death, which Mumbai police are investigating as a suicide, has also resurfaced the debate over the country's stigma against mental health, as well as the industry's rampant nepotism and treatment of "outsiders" Rajput made his way up in the industry without being related to any other filmmakers, actors and producers, a common reality for many. The actress Deepika Padukone, who has been open about her experiences with depression, has tweeted daily reminders this week that depression is an illness, and urged the media to be sensitive in covering Rajput's death. In his relatively short career, Rajput rose from background dancer to leading man. Here are some of his best performances. During a brief stint on the daily soap opera "Kis Desh Mein Hai Meraa Dil," Rajput caught the eye of the show's producer Kapoor, who asked him to audition for "Pavitra Rishta." After seeing his screen test, Rajput later recalled, Kapoor told him, "I will make you a star." In 2009, Rajput landed the lead role in the daily Hindi language soap opera adapted from a Tamil language show, "Thirumathi Selvam." He played Manav Deshmukh, a car mechanic who falls in love with Archana Karanjkar (Ankita Lokhande). The show details their relationship in the face of familial and societal pressure.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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There were tame variations, if sex shop boots can be thought of as tame, and others that stood convention on its head. At Helmut Lang, Shayne Oliver struck an especially risque note, dressing up short boots conceived expressly for the runway with provocatively curly, outsize tongues. At Opening Ceremony, Carol Lim and Humberto Leon festooned white winkle pickers in kinky hardware. And Fenty Puma gave the trend a vigorous nod, parading athletic striped thigh high waders that wiped out the boundary between the sporty and perverse.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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A Russian spacecraft carrying 2.6 tons of food, fuel and supplies but no astronauts to the International Space Station failed to reach orbit on Thursday and largely burned up in the atmosphere as it fell back down. Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, reported that a Soyuz rocket carrying the Progress 65 cargo ship successfully lifted off from Kazakhstan. The first six minutes and 22 seconds of the flight proceeded normally. But shortly after the upper stage separated from the core booster, flight telemetry stopped, leaving ground controllers confused about what had happened. Roscosmos later confirmed that the Progress 65 and its cargo had been destroyed, with the failure occurring about 120 miles over Tuva, a Russian republic in southern Siberia. The cargo included 1,400 pounds of propellant, 112 pounds of oxygen, 925 pounds of water, and 2,750 pounds of spare parts, supplies and scientific experiment hardware. NASA said the Progress was not carrying any supplies crucial for the United States side of the space station. A Japanese cargo ship is scheduled to launch and head to the space station on Dec. 9. Space station managers will have to do some juggling of plans and adjust coming cargo flights. This is the fourth loss of a spacecraft carrying cargo to the space station in the past 25 months. In October 2014, an Antares rocket built by Orbital ATK exploded six seconds after it lifted off in Virginia. Six months later, a Russian Progress cargo ship spun out of control. Then, a Falcon 9 rocket built by SpaceX disintegrated during flight. Before that, the space station program had experienced the loss of only one cargo ship another Progress, in August 2011 in nearly 16 years. This fall, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia called for accelerated construction at a new launch site to replace the current Cosmodrome, which Russia leases from Kazakhstan. The financially ailing Russian space program will temporarily reduce the number of crew members to two from three at the space station next year. In recent months, the flow of supplies to the space station appeared to be getting back on track. An Antares rocket with different engines successfully reached the space station in October. Several Progress ships successfully ferried cargo to the space station before Thursday's failure. SpaceX's Falcon 9 also resumed flights but then was grounded again after one of the Falcon 9 rockets exploded on the launchpad during fueling for an engine test. SpaceX is now aiming to resume the launching of commercial satellites this month, and its next cargo flight is planned for January 2017. NASA officials now seem prescient in asking Orbital ATK to launch its next cargo mission with an Atlas 5 rocket, built by United Launch Alliance, rather than an Antares rocket. Although the redesigned Antares worked well, the Atlas 5 has a long, successful track record and it can lift a heavier payload, allowing NASA to pack in more supplies. That mission is to take off in the spring.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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On Thursday, temperatures on the East Coast are expected to plummet, and some people fellow journalists and weather broadcasters, we're looking at you may start talking about a "polar vortex." We thought you might want to know what the polar vortex is, and what it's not. First, the polar vortex always exists. That catchy, extreme sounding phrase is another term for the polar jet streams, which are caused by low pressure and cold air, encircling both poles. They swirl from west to east, centered around the poles. When a dip in the polar vortex comes to our part of the world, it's usually the result of a change in pressure, which disturbs the swirl, and can push the frosty Arctic air south, according to Faye Barthold, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. And the Arctic jet stream (or polar vortex) can sometimes dip far enough south that it allows the cold air to travel down to places that do not normally have Arctic conditions, like wherever you live.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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A roundup of motoring news from the web: Jimmy Fallon, host of "The Tonight Show," is in the market for a pickup truck, which has caused something of a frenzy among automakers eager for bragging rights if he should choose their truck. Mr. Fallon, who said he wanted a truck that could accommodate his family and a load of pumpkins, talked about the Toyota Tacoma, the Ram 1500 and two versions of the Ford F 150. (PickupTrucks.com) Hyundai is lowering the fuel economy numbers for the redesigned Sonata, which is being introduced in South Korea. Although the automaker had said the car would get close to 30 miles per gallon, that figure was readjusted to about 28 m.p.g. Hyundai apologized for the discrepancy in a statement Monday. (Reuters) Volkswagen announced this week that it was recalling 160,351 Passat sedans from the 2012 13 model years because of a potentially inoperable low beam headlight. The automaker said that reduced visibility could result from the malfunction, but that a dash mounted warning light would alert motorists if it happens. (Reuters) Although Ford Motor is standing behind its decision to build the all new F 150 with an aluminum body, industry analysts are withholding judgment. David Cole, chairman of AutoHarvest and chairman emeritus of the Center for Automotive Research, which is based in Ann Arbor, Mich., called Ford's innovative move a "big roll of the dice" and said it was too early to determine whether using aluminum would be advantageous. (Wards Auto, subscription required)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Rebecca Blumenstein, a deputy managing editor of The Times, with her daughter, Anna Paul, at breakfast at home with some of their tech tools. How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Rebecca Blumenstein, a deputy managing editor for The Times, discussed the tech she's using. What are your favorite tech tools for spotting breaking news and trend stories? I've always been a news junkie, and technology makes that much easier. I reach for my phone the moment I get up and scroll through the headlines of the major sites. I'm a big fan of email newsletters, and they're often the first thing I dive into every day. Politico's Morning Media, The Times's DealBook and morning news briefings, The Wall Street Journal's morning email, and Ben Thompson's Stratechery Daily Update are among my regular reads. I grab parts of the print paper to read on the train, but I usually end up doing most of my reading on my phone. I'm increasingly keeping an eye on the various attempts by tech companies to personalize the news. I like Flipboard and Nuzzel, in particular. While my job requires me to follow the news constantly, I strive to avoid being sucked into merely reacting to someone else's headlines. The Times aims to break news and do the kind of journalism that sets the agenda other outlets must follow. What are some of your favorite tech tools in general? One is the Apple Watch. While I was initially skeptical, I really like how it allows me to be more present in conversations and look at my phone less during the day. It will alert me when I have a meeting coming up. Texts come right to me, which lessens the odds of missing important messages. I also like how it logs the distance of my runs. It would be great to have it be more independent of the phone, though. I haven't upgraded to the new one, but I may have to. Battery life is a constant challenge for me, and I know that the new iPhone would help, but I've only had mine for a year and it would feel a bit wasteful ditching it. I've also been trying out the Huawei Mate 10 Pro phone, which has a significantly longer battery life with two cameras and a processor that uses artificial intelligence to improve the user experience. What are the most important tech trends to follow in the coming years? I think that artificial intelligence is going to fundamentally change the way we work and live. It won't replace humans, but it will change the majority of their jobs by eliminating rote parts of work. How exactly this plays out will have tremendous implications for society. The battle between Detroit and Silicon Valley over the future of cars is epic. Billions of dollars will be won or lost, and the outcome will have big implications for work, especially in the Midwestern states where the traditional automakers still have most of their operations. Cars have already essentially become computers on wheels, and that will only continue as more autonomous features are added. But I believe that electric cars will become far more widespread before fully autonomous driving. We recently bought a Chevy Volt and have been very impressed with the torque of the electric motor and the battery's 45 mile range before the gas engine takes over. I used to cover the auto industry in Detroit, and I think it's important to try out new things. I'm also a firm believer that the spread of technology what some call the fourth industrial revolution will give opportunities to millions of people around the globe. We need to stop thinking of Silicon Valley and New York as the centers of the world; there are now many others. China, in particular, has emerged as a hotbed of tech innovation. It has 700 million internet users and 50 times the number of people using mobile payments as the United States. You've been building up The Times's conferences and live events. How important is tech to the success of these events? The heart of a successful event is the quality of the interviews and the conversation. Live events are a way to bring journalism to life I call it live journalism. While many people want to dive into a 4,000 word investigative story, even more could learn about the findings through a video of an interview with the reporter. We increasingly tap Facebook Live and other social media to make our events more interactive and to include those not fortunate enough to be in the room. I'm also struck by how important live events are. We have more information at our fingertips than ever before. Yet more than ever we also need events that help us meet that person we otherwise wouldn't have. This is a phenomena that has been well explained by my friend Priya Parker in her coming book, "The Art of Gathering." What tech products are your children currently obsessed with? I have three kids, and they teach me an enormous amount about the future of technology. The two youngest, ages 14 and 17, are very into Snapchat. I delayed getting my daughter an iPhone for years, but gave in when she turned 13. She and her friends don't talk on the phone. They Snap. But my daughter knows what's going on in the world. The other morning, she was walking around the house listening to videos from NBC's "Stay Tuned" show. The short segments have gained millions of unique users every month. My 17 year old son is also a big Snapchat fan and loved the feature that took users to a different city and country every week. He is also among the millions very into the video game Fortnite. It's a survival game that he plays with friends who form teams. He hadn't been a gamer until now, and it's driving me a bit crazy, to be honest. My older son, 20, is a sophomore at design school and is very into Instagram. He captures his worldview through his photos and designs, and has developed quite a following. He sees himself as a different generation from his younger siblings. He has also been getting a lot more into news lately, mostly through the Times iPhone app, which makes me happy. What is your favorite low tech thing that you will never give up? My most retro habit is probably shopping in person. I'm a big fan of grocery stores and actually like going to the store. I like interacting with people and laying my hands on my fruit before I buy it. I also found it one of the best places to take my kids when they were young they were interested in everything (even though there were rough moments, of course). It kind of depresses me that people think they need to order everything online now. I'm also a big fan of going to the store to try on shoes or clothes. I just hate having to return things, even when the retailers enclose shipping labels. I think that retailers can succeed if they give a personal touch.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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As we find ourselves stuck hopelessly online, our lexicon grasps back toward the physical world. An example: The word "adjacent" has recently packed its suitcase and taken the short trip from the literal to the figurative. It used to be that "adjacent" meant "next to," as in buildings, or city blocks. These days, it is more likely to signify a more conceptual and vague relation, which the speaker or writer would rather not describe in depth. None On Christmas Day, the CNN commentator Chris Cillizza called Michelle Obama "probably the most popular politics adjacent figure in the country." None A few months before that, Kareem Abdul Jabbar said that Megyn Kelly's remarks on the use of blackface in Halloween costumes were "not quite racist, but racist adjacent" and also hate crime adjacent. None Some months later, Max Newfield, a writer for Heartland Weekend, a Missouri publication, took readers on a tour of "wellness adjacent" beers available for purchase from Southern breweries. (Because beer isn't actually good for you, no matter its adjacencies!) "We almost might need to write a new subsense for this," said Peter Sokolowski, the editor at large of Merriam Webster, of the flock of " adjacents." (Subsense is dictionary world jargon for a secondary meaning of a word.) The usage, he said, was "so new it's not in the damn dictionary." "Adjacent," in this usage, is a postpositive adjective. That just means that it comes after the noun it modifies. This is unusual in English, but standard in French and Latin syntax. Because the conventions of those languages can often read as fancy in English, calling something "cannabis adjacent" or "cosmetics adjacent" grants a nifty sheen. "Like the technical vocabulary of law and medicine, the Latin nature of this word brings the discourse up a notch," Mr. Sokolowski said. "It makes it seem more formal and technical."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Apple said Thursday that it would build a new 1 billion campus in Austin, Tex., where it could eventually employ 15,000 people, amid a broader expansion that will create thousands of jobs in several American cities. The company, which has 90,000 workers in the United States, also plans to open 1,000 worker operations in San Diego, Seattle and Culver City, Calif., and add hundreds of employees in offices in New York, Pittsburgh and Boulder, Colo., in the next three years. "Apple is proud to bring new investment, jobs and opportunity to cities across the United States and to significantly deepen our quarter century partnership with the city and people of Austin," Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, said in a statement. The move coincides with those by other technology giants to expand beyond their West Coast roots. Amazon said last month that it would divide a planned second headquarters between sites in New York and Virginia after a yearlong beauty contest, and Google is said to be considering more than doubling its 7,000 employee work force in New York. Apple has been criticized for years for not doing enough for the American economy because it has made most of its products in China and stashed most of its profits abroad to avoid tax payments in the United States. In January, after the company emerged as one of the biggest beneficiaries of changes in the tax code signed into law by President Trump, it said it would invest more than 30 billion in the United States over the next five years and create 20,000 jobs by expanding existing operations and adding a new campus. A provision in the code allowed for a one time repatriation of corporate cash held abroad at a lower tax rate than what would have been paid under the previous tax plan. Apple used it to bring back 252 billion that it had stashed abroad. Mr. Trump, who had chided Apple over various issues in the past, reacted to the January announcement by praising the company while crediting his own policies for getting it to make the investments. In September, though, Mr. Trump took aim at Apple again over jobs after the company told trade officials in a letter that the administration's tariffs would affect a wide range of products. "Make your products in the United States instead of China," Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. "Start building new plants now." None of the new positions announced by Apple on Thursday appeared to involve manufacturing. Unlike Amazon, whose competition for a new headquarters was highly publicized, Apple has been relatively quiet about its expansion plans. The company opened its own new 5 billion headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., last year. The tech industry's expansion beyond its West Coast base shows the companies' increasing importance to the American economy. As Apple, Google and Amazon add jobs and new offices around the country, companies like General Motors are shrinking and cutting thousand of positions. The new 133 acre campus in Austin will initially employ 5,000 workers in engineering, research and development, operations, finance, sales and customer support. It will ultimately have the capacity for up to 15,000 workers. Apple said it expected that its expanded presence in Austin, where it already employs 6,000 people, would make it the area's largest private employer. Apple said it had applied for a 25 million grant from Texas, payable over 15 years, as well as property tax rebates from Williamson County. Those rebates would be in the tens of millions of dollars over 15 years, said a person familiar with the application, who declined to be named because the negotiations are private. Photos: In 2016, we went inside Apple's sprawling Texas campus. See what it looked like. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas hailed Apple's decision on Thursday as "a testament to the high quality work force and unmatched economic environment that Texas offers." Read more: Apple's rapid growth in Texas has provided a window into the vast constellation of jobs at the world's largest technology company and their economic impact. Read our report.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Credit...Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times IN THE HILLS ABOVE SANTA BARBARA, Calif. A day in the life of Matias Barrera looks a bit like that of many other private school students. There is the rigorous college preparatory curriculum. And a dining hall with local organic beets, plus a cook who whips up fresh salsa. But at 9 o'clock on a recent Sunday morning, he and some classmates stuffed themselves into the back seat of an aging pickup truck cab and set out to gather a week's worth of firewood. Later, other students chopped some of it. Then, at the appointed shower hour, several others built fires to heat the water tanks that do (or do not) ensure a comfortable bathing experience for the 81 students who live in unheated cabins here. At the Midland School in Los Olivos, Calif., 49,900 buys a school year's room and board and a shot at Stanford and Harvard, just as a fee in the mid five figures would at Andover or Exeter. But at Midland, it also gets teenagers a lesson in wants, needs and the slippery continuum stretching between them. It is the very lesson that many grown ups wish we'd gotten long ago. Staggering as that price is, it would be a whole lot more if the school required janitorial services or a larger fleet of kitchen aides. But it doesn't, since the students more or less run the place. And that is fitting for a school where the founder, Paul Squibb, declared back in 1932 that he wanted to create an institution free of the clutter that comes from affluence and the need to keep up with whatever everyone else has or does. Eighty four years later, that philosophy manifests itself in a campus that would almost certainly make the Top 10 list for most spartan among the nation's private secondary schools. And when it comes to the most elemental needs food, light, heat the students play the largest role in providing them. "Working to meet basic needs, and not just having those needs met, is itself an essential human need," according to the dean of studies, Lise Schickel Goddard, who channeled the legacy of Mr. Squibb in a history of the school this year. Midland students are among a shrinking number of California residents who don't have to worry too much about where their water comes from, since the school sits atop an aquifer that is ample to supply its needs. Power, however, is a central concern, and a curricular one, too. Each year, the sophomore class is responsible for a new solar installation intended to draw another 3 percent of the school's electricity needs from the sun. As for food, about 50 percent of the produce that students and faculty members eat comes from the 10 acres of land that they farm organically. Most of the meat comes from pigs and cows they raise. Students work in the kitchen, too, along with the cook and a few other employees. And then there's the matter of warmth. The cabins have only basic wood stoves. Upperclassmen often do without them, given how much space they take up. "What I need now is directly correlated with what everyone else needs," said Duncan McCarthy, a senior. "It's not that I need a shower. Everyone does. That was not the case at school before, where all I needed to do was homework." Faculty members maintain a loose oversight on the various work duties and will hear appeals when there are disagreements among the students. "But with showers, there is no faculty supervision whatsoever," said Lynda Cummings, the director of college counseling, who also lives on the school grounds but does not have to have to fire up her own shower. "If a kid doesn't do the job and everyone gets a cold shower, do I care? Not really." Midland does not value suffering per se. But turning teenagers loose with axes, fire, kitchen knives and live animals in the service of heat and food is, to its leaders, no different from nudging them into an Advanced Placement class. "All of us are pretty poor judges of the limits of our ability," said Christopher Barnes, the head of school. "So we try to push them past the limits of their experience while staying within the limits of their ability." The trick is doing so without being reckless, which entails its own complex calculations of wants and needs. The cabins have sprinklers mainly because of those wood stoves, but no other running water. Students who ring the bell that wakes everyone up and rules the schedule wear ear protection, but they also may ride around on their bikes without wearing helmets. Jose Juan Ibarra, a graduate of the school and now a faculty member, still has a scar on his shoulder from an aggressive bout of teenage wood gathering. And in an accident in 2002, a student who was riding in the bed of a pickup truck a few miles up the road from the main part of campus was killed. As always, most discussions of wants and needs (and Midland grown ups do not shy away from any of them) eventually come around to the following question: How much is enough? How much risk to take? How much dessert which is a want and not a need, but it's something that Maggie Tang, a junior, nevertheless whipped up for everyone 47 times during the last school year. "We have a handful of students who are very affluent and who don't think anything of just ordering anything they see," Mr. Barnes said. "It has transgressed this boundary that Paul Squibb tried to create by being five miles up the road." After one particularly egregious 400 fashion purchase arrived, the head of school gently asked the recipient about its appropriateness. And finally, how much, for lack of a better term, fanciness? Over the years, grateful alumni have inquired about sprucing up the place, perhaps with a tennis program or a swimming pool. But the school wants nothing to do with such things, which are neither simple nor cheap to maintain. Better, it believes, to put money into the financial aid budget, which serves 56 percent of the student body, with an average scholarship of 33,553. Even so, I couldn't help wondering whether the Midland gestalt wasn't all so much rich hippie pablum, what with the dogs that some students bring to school (who must pass their own admissions test) and buildings that are partly open to the elements. Recent Stanford and Harvard admissions aside, is it mostly a place where parents send their children for a sort of spiritual delousing? Midland faculty members and administrators have heard it all before. Mr. Barnes, who is new on the job this year, says he believes he may have a different problem. The place is so serious about living its truth that it may be scaring off some families. It is not quite at capacity, and he would like it to be. But when he was running the hiring gantlet and talking about all of that, he received a clear message that he was not to fool with the bathing ritual. Midland students are very protective of their shower fires. Mr. Barnes and his family spent a few years on a small sailboat with no shower before they came to California, so he was pretty sure he knew how those teenagers felt. "If you can narrow down your sense of need," he said, "you can buy yourself an incredible amount of freedom."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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Even the fastest, most powerful new cars can be classified as fuel sipping stewards of the environment by the federal government's measure, anyway. Despite increasingly challenging revisions to fuel economy standards, each demanding significant improvements in efficiency, fewer cars are incurring the gas guzzler penalties stipulated by the Environmental Protection Agency. To a great extent, this is a result of technology developments made by the automakers, which include hybrid powertrains, smaller turbocharged engines, advanced transmissions and lightweight structures. But the trend in 2012, the Internal Revenue Service collected 73.5 million through the gas guzzler tax, down from 201.7 million in 2006 calls into question the relevance of a law that was written in the late 1970s and last updated in 1990. The shrinking pool of vehicles subject to the tax is a sign of the steady flow of improvements, delivered each model year, in which higher fuel economy numbers have often arrived with little or no sacrifice in horsepower or acceleration. Yet unlike other policies intended to spur the acceptance of greener, higher mileage vehicles, the gas guzzler tax has not evolved to keep pace with the market. Even as the Corporate Average Fuel Economy program, new federal greenhouse gas standards and California's zero emission vehicle incentives prod automakers to continue their progress in raising efficiency, the guzzler tax is losing its bite as a means of promoting efficiency and as a source of revenue. The tax is levied on passenger cars with a combined city highway fuel economy rating of less than 22.5 miles per gallon, as measured by the standardized testing procedure of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The rules are complex. For instance, the mileage numbers displayed on a car's window sticker are derived using a different methodology that produces values 20 to 25 percent lower, so a car that displays an E.P.A. combined rating of 21 m.p.g. may not incur a guzzler penalty. And the regulations embody any number of allowances and loopholes. The penalties start at 1,000 and increase to 7,700 for cars that achieve less than 12.5 m.p.g., although there isn't a vehicle that is taxed at the steepest rate. Automakers pay the fee to the I.R.S., but the cost is passed on to buyers in the price of the car. The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse with its 16 cylinder engine is the thirstiest car on sale in America at 10 m.p.g. combined on the window sticker. An unadjusted rating of 12.6 m.p.g. means it is subject to a 6,400 guzzler tax, higher than any other model. That may be a pittance compared with the Bugatti's 2.3 million price, but even if the tax has a negligible effect on the car's cost (or a customer's decision to buy), there are alternatives, also fast and exotic, that escape the tax altogether. The 887 horsepower 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder, the quickest production vehicle that Car and Driver magazine has ever tested, charges to 60 m.p.h. in 2.2 seconds and rockets through the quarter mile in 9.8 seconds with its V8 engine roaring. Two electric motors and a lithium ion battery pack add a power boost when the car is driven hard but can also deliver up to 12 miles of electric only range if driven conservatively. That hybrid system also helps the 847,975 918 Spyder clear the gas guzzler tax's 22.5 m.p.g. bar. (The E.P.A. combined rating on the window sticker is 22 m.p.g.) BMW and Mercedes Benz face the greatest exposure to the guzzler tax when measured by the number of models affected. To reduce fuel consumption in models from their performance divisions, BMW M and Mercedes AMG, the companies are making a transition to smaller engines that drink less in mileage tests and relaxed driving, relying on turbochargers to deliver extra thrust on demand. The engine that powers the 2015 BMW M3 and M4 models, for instance, is a twin turbocharged 6 cylinder engine that replaces the V8s their predecessors used. The new models are quicker and more powerful, yet also efficient enough to avoid the guzzler designation. Rather than promoting efficiency, the guzzler penalty these days serves mainly as a sin tax, having outlived the luxury car tax that expired in 2002. In 2013, there were roughly 60 nameplates billed as gas guzzlers, more than half of them with prices starting over 100,000. The cheapest model was a Dodge Challenger SRT8 with a price of 41,020, including a 1,030 gas guzzler tax; the 707 horsepower 2015 Challenger Hellcat has a 2,100 penalty. Perhaps nothing is more telling of how dated the gas guzzler regulations are than the fact that pickup trucks and S.U.V.s are not subject to the tax. When the Energy Tax Act of 1978 was passed in the midst of a fuel crisis, trucks were primarily bought for commercial use; their thirst was viewed as an unavoidable consequence of needed capability. But restricting the guzzler tax to cars led to a major shift in the types of vehicles built and bought, with full size cars declining and the modern sport utility vehicles emerging. Today, light duty trucks account for more than half of all new vehicle sales in the United States. Changing the gas guzzler tax penalties requires an act of Congress, and regulatory agencies appear content with the latest fuel economy and emissions legislation. When asked if the guzzler rules needed to be modernized, Ernesta Jones, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., instead called attention to its greenhouse gas and fuel economy standards. The gas guzzler tax was adopted a year after the Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations went into effect. Originally, manufacturers were held to a single average for their entire year's production, so a carmaker could offset inefficient vehicles by selling fuel sipping hybrids and subcompacts. In 2012, the law changed to establish fuel economy mandates for individual models based on their size, giving manufacturers added incentive to improve their thirstiest vehicles, in some cases lifting guzzlers off the list. "From a policy perspective, it's kind of a belt and suspenders approach," said David L. Greene, a research professor at the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee, noting that the stricter the fuel economy standard, the fewer the benefits that accrue from a tax. It's likely that the gas guzzler law will be reviewed and rewritten only if legislators decide that, even as cars become cleaner and more economical, the thirstiest cars are always socially unacceptable. "It's as much a morality or ethical perception as a question of economically efficient policy," Mr. Greene said. "Whether it sticks around is more a matter of whether people like it than whether it has a big impact, because it's not having a big impact."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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LOS ANGELES A five studio tug of war has broken out over James Bond. For more than a decade, starting with "Casino Royale" in 2006, the superspy series has been based at Sony Pictures Entertainment. It has been a period of stability and prosperity for 007, as global ticket sales reached new heights. The four Bond films that Sony has released collected 3.5 billion at the worldwide box office, after adjusting for inflation. But Sony's contract to market and distribute the films expired in 2015 with "Spectre." So the two companies that control the franchise but do not distribute their own films Metro Goldwyn Mayer and the family run Eon Productions have started attending dog and pony shows put on by studios that want the rights, according to five people briefed on the sessions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. On Tuesday, for instance, leaders at Sony spent an hour making their case. Kazuo Hirai, the chief executive, helped give the pitch, which emphasized the studio's deep knowledge of Bond and its ideas for expanding the franchise's reach. In true Hollywood fashion, Sony gave its presentation inside a sound stage on a recreated set from "Dr. No," which was released in the United States in 1963 by United Artists and laid the foundation for the entire series. Also vying for the Bond deal even though it pays surprisingly little are Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Annapurna, an ambitious upstart financed and led by the Oracle heiress Megan Ellison. (Not competing for the business are Paramount, which has been struggling and recently hired a new chairman, and Walt Disney Studios, which has been on a box office hot streak by focusing on its own family film labels.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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He was, according to his unsparing head coach, one of the best ever to play his position, and for more than a decade, game after game, season after season, the New England Patriots relied on him to in their vernacular do his job, and he did, about as well as anyone in N.F.L. history. In a morass of volatility, he was a paragon of consistency, and the Patriots, whether they realize it or not, will probably miss him now that he is gone. They will also miss Tom Brady. Aside from identifying its next quarterback, New England must unearth a new kicker after its Monday release of Stephen Gostkowski, who after 14 seasons leaves with three Super Bowl rings and the franchise's scoring record. After Brady's announcement that he would play elsewhere next season he eventually signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Gostkowski lasted about a week as New England's longest tenured player. The decision to cut him was not wholly unexpected. Gostkowski, 36, missed most of last season because of a hip injury, and in a turbulent off season in which the Patriots' calculating coach, Bill Belichick, has allowed Brady plus the linebackers Kyle Van Noy and Jamie Collins, among others, to exit in free agency, loyalty pales next to opportunity costs. But it is a seismic loss, nonetheless, around New England, considering the Patriots' remarkable stability at perhaps the most capricious position in the league. Extra points were flubbed, field goal attempts shanked and jobs lost, but not in New England, where for most of the past 25 years the Patriots have employed just two kickers: Adam Vinatieri, who won three Super Bowls from 1996 to 2005 and, at 47, still plays for Indianapolis, and Gostkowski, who handled replacing a legend of a predecessor with aplomb.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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FOSHAN, China After years of being pushed to work 12 hour days, six days a week on monotonous low wage assembly line tasks, China's workers are starting to push back. A strike at an enormous Honda transmission factory here in southeastern China has suddenly and unexpectedly turned into a symbol of this nation's struggle with income inequality, rising inflation and soaring property prices that have put home ownership beyond the reach of all but the most affluent. And perhaps most remarkably, Chinese authorities let the strike happen up to a point. In the kind of scene that more often plays out at strikes in America than at labor actions in China, print and television reporters from state controlled media across the country have started covering the walkout here, even waiting outside the nearly deserted front gate on Thursday and Friday in hope of any news. All the Chinese reporters disappeared on Saturday morning, however, as the government, apparently nervous, suddenly imposed without explanation a blanket ban on domestic media coverage of the strike. A worker at a factory dormitory said on Saturday afternoon that the strike continued, and police were nowhere in sight at the factory or the dormitory. The authorities have been leery of letting the media report on labor disputes, fearing that it could encourage workers elsewhere to rebel. The new permissiveness, however temporary, coincides with growing sentiment among some officials and economists that Chinese workers deserve higher wages for their role in the country's global export machine. And without higher incomes, hundreds of millions of Chinese will be unable to play their part in the domestic consumer spending boom on which this nation hopes to base its next round of economic growth. "This is all because there is a major political debate going on about how to deal with the nation's growing income gap, and the need to do something about wages," said Andreas Lauffs, a lawyer at Baker McKenzie who specializes in Chinese labor issues. If wages do rise, that could bring higher prices for Western consumers for goods as diverse as toys at Wal Mart and iPads from Apple. The Chinese media may also have found it a little easier, politically, to cover this strike because Honda is a Japanese company, and anti Japanese sentiment still simmers in China as a legacy of World War II. Certainly, the strike is hitting Honda hard, as the resulting shortage of transmissions and other engine parts has forced the company to halt production at all four of its assembly plants in China. Honda has an annual capacity of 650,000 cars and minivans in China, like Jazz subcompacts for export to Europe and Accord sedans for the Chinese market. Because Honda's prices in China are similar to what it charges in the United States, the cars tend to be far out of reach financially for most of the workers who make them. A Honda spokeswoman declined to discuss specific issues in the strike negotiations. The intense media coverage may evoke historical memories of the 1980 shipyard strike in Gdansk, Poland, that gave rise to the Solidarity movement and paved the way for the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. But the reality here is much different. Instead of tens of thousands of grizzled and angry shipyard workers, the Honda strike involves about 1,900 mostly cheerful young people. And the employees interviewed say their goal is more money, not a larger political agenda. "If they give us 800 renminbi a month, we'll go back to work right away," said one young man, describing a pay increase that would add about 117 a month to an average pay that is now around 150 monthly. He said he had read on the Internet of considerably higher wages at other factories in China and expected Honda to match them with an immediate pay increase. Many workers at other factories in southeastern China already earn 300 a month, but they do so only through considerable overtime. And even that higher income is not enough to embark on the middle class dream in China of owning a small apartment and subcompact car. Officially, though, the government is discouraging heavy reliance on overtime, and workers here said that Honda was not assigning much. The strikers said that Honda mainly hired recent graduates of high schools or vocational schools. And so, most are in their late teens or early 20s, representing a new generation of employees, many of whom had not been born when the Chinese authorities suppressed protests by students and workers in Tiananmen Square in 1989 a watershed event whose 21st anniversary falls next Friday. The profile of striking workers seems to run more along the lines of slightly bookish would be engineers perhaps without the grades or money to attend college rather than political activists. Besides their low wages, the workers seem focused on issues like the factory's air conditioning not being cool enough, and the unfairness of having to rise from their dormitories as early as 5:30 for a 7 a.m. shift. Workers said that in addition to their pay, they also received free lodging in rooms that slept four to six in bunk beds. They also get free lunches, subsidized breakfasts for the equivalent of 30 cents and dinners for about 1.50. The striking employees said that some senior workers, known as team leaders, had allied themselves with management. But they insisted that the rank and file workers were solidly in favor of walkout a claim impossible to verify. Although China is run by the Communist Party and has state controlled unions, the unions are largely charged with overseeing workers, not bargaining for higher wages or pressing for improved labor conditions. And they are not allowed to strike, although China's laws do not have explicit prohibitions against doing so. Workers at the Honda factory dormitory said that the official union at the factory was not representing them but was serving as an intermediary between them and management. Li Jianming, the national spokesman for the All China Federation of Trade Unions, declined to comment. The workers here have been on strike since May 21, with no resolution in sight. But the strike did not come to broader notice until Thursday and Friday as Japanese media began reporting the shutdown of Honda assembly plants, and as Chinese media and Internet sites were allowed to report extensively on those activities. The unusually permissive approach of the authorities toward media coverage of the strike follows a decision to tolerate extensive coverage this month of suicides by workers at the Taiwanese owned Foxconn factory complex in nearby Shenzhen that supplies Apple and Hewlett Packard. The official China Daily newspaper ran a lead editorial on Friday that cited the Honda strike as evidence that government inaction on wages might be fueling tensions between workers and employers. The editorial criticized the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security for not moving faster to draft a promised amendment to current wage regulations because of what the newspaper described as opposition from employers. Zheng Qiao, the associate director of the department of employment relations at the China Institute of Industrial Relations in Beijing, said the strike was a significant development in China's labor relations history and that "such a large scale, organized strike will force China's labor union system to change, to adapt to the market economy."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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In the spring of 1880, in a railroad town in Dakota Territory, a girl in her 15th year bends over her sewing to help support her family. This might be "Little Town on the Prairie," the seventh book in Laura Ingalls Wilder's iconic series about a pioneer family. But it also describes PRAIRIE LOTUS (Clarion, 272 pp., 16.99; ages 10 and up), the captivating new novel by the Newbery medalist Linda Sue Park, whose heroine, Hanna Edmunds, is half Chinese. The parallels to the Little House series are deliberate and at times delicious. Hanna, a more accomplished seamstress than Laura, shares an almost comical aversion to making buttonholes. Godey's dress patterns, school exam nerves, the incredible taste of an orange, a town rising one storefront at a time readers of Wilder's work will savor the connections. Yet the richest material in "Prairie Lotus" comes from Hanna herself. In an author's note, Park describes the book as "an attempt at a painful reconciliation." The daughter of Korean immigrants, she "adored the Wilder books," as if the Ingalls family could provide a "road map to becoming American." But Park was not blind to the racism that runs through the books, particularly in the mother's attitude toward Native Americans and her "stifling" sense of propriety. Park knew Laura would not have been permitted "to become friends with someone like me ... someone who wasn't white." The differences between Hanna and Laura pile up as quickly as the resemblances. Hanna and her father travel east to Dakota, not west. They leave their home in Los Angeles after the death of her mother, a casualty of the 1871 Chinese Massacre. Hanna is an only child, and Ben Edmunds is a storekeeper, with more money than the Ingalls family can raise in three books combined. The importance of community is tempered in "Prairie Lotus" by Hanna's knowledge that "most white people didn't like having neighbors who weren't white themselves." Whereas Laura becomes increasingly observant to describe the world to a blind sister, Hanna must rely on her keen powers of observation to assess "people she met, in an effort to guess how they might treat her."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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The rousing musical "Once on This Island," which uses the style of a Caribbean folk tale about love to explore class tensions, will be revived on Broadway this fall. The producers Ken Davenport and Hunter Arnold said Monday that they would commence an international search, beginning in Haiti, to cast Ti Moune, the peasant girl whose love for a wealthier boy is at the heart of the story. The musical is set in the French Antilles, and is based on the novel "My Love, My Love" by Rosa Guy. The show features music by Stephen Flaherty and a book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, a composing team that won a Tony Award in 1998 for the score of "Ragtime," and that is represented this season on Broadway with "Anastasia," now in previews. "Once on This Island" was first produced in 1990 at Playwrights Horizons, an Off Broadway nonprofit, when Frank Rich, then a theater critic for The New York Times, wrote, "the audience feels the otherworldly thrill of discovering the fabric of its own lives in an enchanted tapestry from a distant shore." The production transferred that year to Broadway, directed by Graciela Daniele and starring LaChanze, and ran for 19 previews and 469 regular performances.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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In the 2018 picture "Bleeding Steel," the daredevil performer Jackie Chan pulled off a remarkable action sequence on top of the Sydney Opera House. Thrilling, and a little surprising. The man turned 66 this year. He's broken a lot of bones to entertain us during the course of a multidecade career and owes us nothing. But he's still an international star. If he's not going to kickbox atop high places, what should he be doing in movies? "The Foreigner," a relatively sober action drama from 2017 in which Chan gave a frankly middling performance, was one answer. "Vanguard" is more in line with his brand of amiable action mayhem Chan pioneered in 1980s vehicles like "Police Story" and "Project A," only not as good.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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LONDON People are often at their most openly conversational and expansive when they are having their hair cut, which makes one wonder why more plays don't utilize the opportunities provided by our shared tonsorial needs as ready made prompts for drama. ("Sweeney Todd" doesn't count.) By way of proof, look no further than Inua Ellams's "Barber Shop Chronicles," an exploration of black masculinity set in six cities across two continents. The all male cast gets a (simulated) trim and shave, leaving the audience to share in the genuine, if sometimes sorrow inflected, buoyancy of the piece as a whole. By the time the performance running just shy of two hours, with no intermission has finished, you may feel caught up in the sort of giddy verbal jam session one associates with the plays of August Wilson. (Like that American dramatist, the Nigerian born Mr. Ellams is a poet as well as a dramatist.) The production, directed with palpable empathy by Bijan Sheibani, runs through July 8 in repertory at the National Theater's smallest space, the Dorfman, before transferring north for a further engagement at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. It will return to the National in November. But this is a work, full of humanity and glancing wit, that one can imagine traveling far and wide. Those who arrive early might even find themselves led to pride of place in a barber's chair onstage at least until the performance proper begins, and we find ourselves eavesdropping on musings that shift moods on a dime. The connective tissue across the multiple storefronts is a decisive soccer match between Barcelona and Chelsea that is on TV in the background while the men gather to shoot the breeze about issues both personal and political, marital problems here and disenchantment with post Mandela South Africa there. In Uganda, an especially grand customer complains of having an ingrown hair that demands attention "Nobody looks at my skin more than me" while a father in South Africa ponders the fate of an errant son who has gone to London to try his luck as an actor. (Elsewhere, we see that same young man using the internet to try to reconnect with his father.) Along the way, one notes a pattern: families severed, willingly or not; and various forms of disenfranchisement, be they racial, social, or linguistic. Many an unprintable racial epithet, and their effects on these men, gets folded into a cross fire of chatter. The set by Rae Smith, a 2011 Tony winner for "War Horse," places the action in a central rectangle with the audience on all sides, above which hangs a globe that itself encases a glitter ball. Illuminated signs indicate which barber shop we happen to be inhabiting at that moment. The result is a dramatic collage, entirely unpolemical, name checking the likes of Fela Kuti, Jay Z, and Tupac Shakur along the way. How one assesses maleness is an ongoing topic for Mr. Ellams, who has moved on from self performed solo plays to allow 11 actors the ensemble of a playgoer's dreams. It may seem unfair to single out any of them, but one simply has to commend the infectious appeal across four roles of the sweet faced Hammed Animashaun, and the gathering tension at their South London workplace borne out by Cyril Nri, representing an older generation that has seen it all, and by Fisayo Akinade, playing a lippy young malcontent who is revealed to have a reason for his aggressive behavior. And I shall not soon forget Patrice Naiambana as the reflective, slow speaking Simphiwe, a South African suspended between memories of the father who threw him out and concerns about the son he has all but lost. Around the corner from the Dorfman, the National's thrust stage Olivier has opened a new play, "Common," which has in turn fed the oddest debate in the London theater world so far this year: Is D. C. Moore's often incomprehensible historical epic better or worse than the writer director Yael Farber's poorly reviewed "Salome," with which "Common" is currently running in repertory? If I preferred "Common," that's largely because the National, as is its wont, has been able to throw at the material a team of A list talent that includes the Olivier nominated actress Anne Marie Duff ("Saint Joan," "Collected Stories") as the foul mouthed heroine, Mary, and an offstage team that can lay claim to a 2015 Tony nominee, Jeremy Herrin ("Wolf Hall") as its director, and a 1998 Tony winner, Richard Hudson ("The Lion King"), as its scenic designer. Even at its most opaque, Mr. Moore's willfully bewildering portrait of the changing English landscape of some two centuries ago is illuminated by the commitment of a company that avoids the crippling self seriousness of "Salome." I also got a kick out of learning adjectives like "knotty knickered." By way of contrast, and then some, there's grim reward to be found in the studio space of the Royal Court Theater Upstairs, where Rachel O'Riordan's production of the Gary Owen play "Killology" is running through June 24. The pair's credits also include "Iphigenia in Splott," which recently concluded a limited Off Broadway engagement, while Mr. Owen had a previous Court success in 2015 with the play "Violence and Son." While the new play sometimes feels like a staged thesis about the societal effects of violence, it's nonetheless trenchantly performed by an all male trio dominated early on by Sion Daniel Young as a gangly man child who has experienced firsthand the sadism from which the game maker Paul (a commanding Richard Mylan) has made serious cash.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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A tone of stark austerity seems to have become the default mode of contemporary films about drug addiction (Josh and Bennie Safdie's excellent 2015 film "Heaven Knows What" being a notable exception). This holds for "Werewolf," a Canadian film written and directed by Ashley McKenzie. But the particulars of Ms. McKenzie's approach, and the excellent work of her lead actors, bring new value to the mode. Andrew Gillis and Bhreagh MacNeil play Blaise and Vanessa, two addicts on a methadone program. Young, dirt poor and without any significant options for moving their lives forward, they trudge around the small town they're stuck in, dragging a lawn mower with them. Entrepreneurship, such as it is, subsists in their offering to cut neighborhood lawns for money. And of course, eventually the lawn mower breaks.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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The WTA has a 10 year deal with Shenzhen, and the city is building a new 12,000 seat stadium to host the finals and other sporting events. Simon has said Shenzhen's total investment in tennis infrastructure and the WTA Tour would likely amount to more than 1 billion.He said he did not expect the tour would rethink its focus on China. "We know there's still a very strong commitment to us there," he said. "It's just an unfortunate situation. We are disappointed in the decision but respect it." Though there have been plenty of shifts in the tennis calendar this year, with the French Open moving its starting date from May to September and Wimbledon being canceled, Simon said it was "very improbable" that the tour could move the 2020 finals to another country. He said the tour might add some events in the now empty late season but that finding financing would be challenging. There is still a chance that the Asian tournaments in Seoul, South Korea, in early October and Tokyo in early November could be maintained, and Simon said they might be moved closer together to create a much smaller Asian swing. The other six Chinese tournaments to be canceled by the WTA are the China Open in Beijing, the Wuhan Open, the Jiangxi Open in Nanchang, the Zhengzhou Open, the WTA Elite Trophy in Zhuhai and the Guanghzhou Open. The China Open is a premier mandatory event, the highest category of tournament on the regular WTA Tour (the four Grand Slam events operate independently). Three of the four premier mandatory events have been canceled in 2020 with only the Mutua Madrid Open, rescheduled for September, still a possibility. For now, the WTA Tour is set to resume on Aug. 3 after a five month hiatus with a clay court event in Palermo, Italy, followed by tournaments in Prague and Lexington, Ky. Simon said he viewed those three events as a trial run for the rest of the tour as the virus continues to spread, especially in the United States. "I mean you have to expect there will be a positive case," he said. "I think it's how you manage it. You are going to have some, but you have to see if it's something we're able to control due to the uniqueness of how we have to operate." The WTA, which already has cut pay for its top employees during the pandemic and provided some financial relief to players, likely will need to dig into its reserves, which were estimated to be about half of the ATP's before the pandemic. Under economic pressure, the WTA and ATP have had serious discussions about merging some commercial rights and much more tentative talks about a future merger. The WTA Tour had total prize money of 179 million in 2019, including the four Grand Slam tournaments. That is up from 86 million in 2009. But this year will mark a big step backward with the tour shut down since March and with the cancellation of the Fed Cup team event and of Wimbledon, which did make some compensatory payouts this month to players who would have competed in the tournament. The United States Open, scheduled for Aug. 31 to Sept. 13 in New York, is still not certain to go ahead largely because of questions about quarantine requirements for players who would be heading back to Europe afterward.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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WASHINGTON Consumer prices in the United States are rising at the slowest pace during a period of economic growth in the last half century, a trend that could delay the Federal Reserve's retreat from its stimulus campaign. An index of the prices Americans pay for goods and services rose just 0.8 percent during the 12 months ending in December as the collapse of oil prices offset the higher cost of food and health care, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Friday. The slow pace of inflation means Americans are experiencing less erosion in the value of their paychecks at a time when wages, too, are rising unusually slowly. But it is also evidence that the recovery from the Great Recession remains incomplete. And sluggish inflation itself can impede debt repayment and other economic adjustments. The Fed has said it plans to start raising its benchmark interest rate around the middle of the year. Job growth has outstripped its expectations and other economic indicators are improving. The University of Michigan's consumer survey reported on Friday that consumer confidence in January hit the highest level in a decade. "We've all been expecting this given what oil prices are doing," Charles Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, said in an interview on Friday. "The bigger question is what happens in the next four to six months. Will inflation begin to drift back up toward our target? I think that it will." But Fed officials also have underscored in recent weeks that their policy decisions will be determined by the course of events, not by their predictions. And some analysts said on Friday that it seemed increasingly likely the Fed would once again decide to wait a little longer before finally raising interest rates. "In light of the downward pressure on inflation, we expect the F.O.M.C. will be 'patient' this year as far as monetary policy is concerned," Ryan Wang, United States economist at HSBC, wrote in a note to clients on Friday, referring to the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets policy. "We believe the committee will hold off any increase in the federal funds rate until September, waiting for evidence that both total and core inflation have bottomed out and are beginning to rise again." The Fed aims to keep inflation at a 2 percent annual pace, and Friday's report is worse than it looks because the Fed prefers a different government measure that tends to show somewhat less inflation. That measure, the index of personal consumption expenditures, will be updated later this month. Separately, the Fed reported that industrial production fell by 0.1 percent in December, driven mostly by a sharp drop in utility output caused mostly by a swing from an unusually cold November to an unusually warm December. A 0.3 percent increase in manufacturing and a 2.2 gain jump in mining, which showed that crude oil production was continuing to advance despite the drop in prices, offset most of the drop in utility output. The sharp decline of oil prices is a crucial factor in the low inflation figures. The government said the price of gasoline fell 21 percent over the last year, and analysts said cheap gas also appeared to be holding down the cost of some other goods and services. But oil prices cannot continue to fall at the same pace, and surveys of economists and consumers show a widespread expectation that inflation will rebound. The University of Michigan's consumer survey reported on Friday that expectations for inflation over the next year declined substantially to 2.4 percent in January from 2.8 percent in December. Crucially, however, the survey reported no change in consumer expectations for annual inflation five years from now. "The bottom line is that permanently lower energy prices are a stimulus package for U.S. consumers," Laura Rosner, an economist at BNP Paribas, wrote on Friday. "Stronger final demand should speed up inflation's return to 2 percent, not slow it down or make it less likely." The weakness of inflation, however, predates the collapse of oil prices. The Fed has not hit its 2 percent target in more than two years. And the data suggests other factors, including a strengthening dollar, are restraining inflation. The prices of imported goods like clothing and cars also have fallen in recent months. Notably, a version of the consumer index that excludes oil and food did not rise in December. The Fed and many independent economists regard this measure, known as core inflation, as a more accurate indicator of future inflation because oil and food prices are volatile, obscuring the underlying trend. Measures of inflation expectations derived from asset prices suggested that some investors had doubts about how quickly inflation was likely to rebound and they are increasingly betting the Fed will wait until the fall to raise rates. The Fed, however, has not significantly altered its timetable in more than a year, and officials have said they will not wait for inflation to recover before acting. Janet L. Yellen, the Fed chairwoman, said last month that it would be sufficient for officials to feel "reasonably confident" that inflation was going to rebound. James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said on Friday that the Fed was being pulled in opposite directions by the growing strength of the economy and the weakness of inflation. He noted that the Fed had underestimated job growth and overestimated inflation in each of the last two years. But Mr. Bullard, speaking in Chicago, said that on balance, based on current economic conditions, he was inclined to think that the time had come to raise rates. "The level of inflation is not so low that it can alone justify a policy rate of zero," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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SHANGHAI Earlier this year, the authorities here began looking into suspicious activity involving a Shanghai travel agency that was rumored to have huge revenue but few bookings. What they uncovered, they said Monday, was a conspiracy involving tens of millions of dollars, directed by senior executives at the British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline. Investigators said that for years, high ranking executives at the company's China operations used travel agencies as money laundering shops to funnel bribes to doctors, hospitals, medical associations, foundations and government officials. The payoffs, investigators said, helped bolster drug sales and allowed GlaxoSmithKline, also known as GSK, to sell its products for higher prices in China. At a news conference in Beijing on Monday, the authorities accused senior executives at the company's China operations of organizing fictitious conferences, overbilling for training sessions and in various other ways filing sham expenses for which the cooperating travel agencies would issue bogus receipts. That enabled the GSK executives to get reimbursed by their company with money they could use for bribes, investigators said, while the travel agencies skimmed off shares of the money for themselves. The practice is said to be so common a form of money laundering, and so lucrative for travel agencies, that they would compete for the chance to take part. Sometimes they would induce GSK executives to throw the business their way by offering cash, luxury travel or even by hiring young women to engage in sexual activities or "sexual bribery" with GSK managers, Chinese officials said. "It's like a criminal organization there's always a boss," Gao Feng, head of the economic crime unit of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, said at the news conference. "And in this case," he said, "GSK is the boss." The revelations came just days after the police announced that several GSK executives had confessed to engaging in bribery and tax fraud. The possible punishments or fines for GSK are unclear, experts said, but the investigation is almost certain to cause concern among the ranks of major multinational companies operating in China. In recent weeks, regulators in China have stepped up their scrutiny of multinationals. After dairy producers were accused of price fixing, for instance, several of them announced price cuts. GSK is one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies. Last year, it recorded nearly 40 billion in revenue worldwide by selling popular drugs like the antidepressant Paxil, the diabetes treatment Avandia and the ulcer medicine Zantac. Although China still accounts for but a small portion of GSK's revenue about 1.2 billion last year, out of nearly 40 billion over all it is one of the company's fastest growing markets and home to 6,000 employees as well as large manufacturing and research and development facilities. On Monday, the government said four senior executives from GSK's China offices were being detained, including the head of the drug maker's legal department, the head of business development and two vice presidents. The four held are all Chinese nationals, the police said. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Mark Reilly, head of GSK's operations in China, a British national, recently left the country, the police said, shortly after investigators raided the company's offices in late June. "This is a very serious allegation," Mr. Gao, one of the lead investigators, said at the news conference, while noting that the head of the company's China operations had left the country. The investigation is a huge embarrassment for GSK, which recently fired the head of its research and development department in Shanghai for misrepresenting data in a paper he co wrote in 2010. The company also said that it had conducted an internal investigation into its China operations this year after a whistle blower claimed that bribery was used to bolster drug sales. The company said it found no evidence of wrongdoing or bribery in the China operation. But on Monday, GSK released a lengthy statement that expressed its frustration. "We are deeply concerned and disappointed by these serious allegations of fraudulent behavior and ethical misconduct by certain individuals at the company and third party agencies," the company said. "Such behavior would be a clear breach of GSK's systems, governance procedures, values and standards. GSK has zero tolerance for any behavior of this nature." The statement added: "GSK shares the desire of the Chinese authorities to root out corruption. These allegations are shameful and we regret this has occurred." The company said it would cooperate with the authorities and take immediate action to improve compliance procedures and end its dealings with travel agencies that might have committed fraud. At the news conference on Monday in Beijing, the authorities said the investigation was continuing and that the case involved scores of travel agencies as well as other multinational corporations. In detailing its accusations against GSK, investigators suggested that using travel agencies to engage in bribery was a common business tactic in China. "From our investigation, we found that bribery was part of the strategy of the company," Mr. Gao said of GSK. The investigation is certain to heighten concerns among other global drug makers, some of which are already under scrutiny from regulators in the United States and elsewhere over the incentives they give to doctors or clients.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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LOS ANGELES "Stuber" stalled at the box office over the weekend, accentuating a problem with movies coming off the 20th Century Fox assembly line: They aren't very good. "Stuber," an R rated buddy flick starring Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista that cost about 25 million to make, also raised new questions about the theatrical viability of modestly budgeted comedies in the Netflix age. North American moviegoers have given a cold shoulder to one such comedy after another this summer, including "Late Night," "Long Shot," "The Hustle," "Shaft," "Poms" and "Booksmart." As usual, franchises dominated multiplex marquees over the weekend. The No. 1 movie was "Spider Man: Far From Home" (Sony Pictures), which collected about 45.3 million, for a 13 day domestic total of 274.5 million ( 847 million worldwide). "Toy Story 4" (Disney Pixar) was second, generating about 20.7 million in ticket sales, for a four week global total of 771.1 million, according to Comscore. Among new wide releases, "Crawl" (Paramount) did the best, capitalizing on surprisingly strong reviews. A horror movie about alligators on the loose during a hurricane, "Crawl" took in roughly 12 million, enough for third place. Paramount spent 13.5 million to make the R rated movie, which the studio supported with a shrewd marketing campaign that positioned the film as a frothy summertime diversion. Distributed by Disney, which took over the Fox movie factory in March, "Stuber" had a marketing campaign that cost at least 30 million. Disney aggressively went after men, releasing trailers during WrestleMania and the N.B.A. Finals. Disney owned ESPN was a marketing partner. The film's crass tagline: "Saving the day takes a pair." "Stuber," about an Uber driver named Stu who picks up a detective, received largely negative reviews, according to the criticism aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. David A. Gross, who runs Franchise Entertainment Research, a movie consultancy, called it "an extremely weak entry." The previous Fox film released by Disney was the superhero movie "Dark Phoenix," which collapsed under withering reviews last month. It cost an estimated 350 million to make and market worldwide and took in about 250 million, roughly half of which goes to theater owners. Another Fox film, "Woman in the Window," starring Amy Adams as an agoraphobic psychologist who witnesses a crime, was pulled from Disney's 2019 release schedule last week and sent for reshoots. Instead of being released in October as planned, the movie will now arrive sometime next year. Disney declined to comment on Fox's output. Insiders say they have high hopes for "Ford v Ferrari," a Fox bio drama starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale that is scheduled for November release, among other films. Next up on the Disney Fox roster is the drama "The Art of Racing in the Rain," a dog focused movie adapted from the 2008 novel of the same name. To be fair to "Stuber," even critically acclaimed comedies like "Booksmart" and "Late Night" have fizzled at the box office in recent months and ticket sales for comedies and romantic comedies have been on a steady slide for the past decade, according to a recent analysis by The Hollywood Reporter. In 2009, comedies grossed 2.5 billion at the domestic box office; last year, the genre generated only 1 billion. Some studio executives point to original comedies on Netflix, which make it easy for those looking for laughs to skip theaters. The relentless focus on big budget franchise films has made it hard for comedies to find any multiplex oxygen. There has also been a melding of genres: Marvel movies and the coming "Fast Furious Presents: Hobbs Shaw" showcase a great deal of comedy along with the action. But there are exceptions. "Yesterday" (Universal), a quirky romantic comedy with a Beatles soundtrack, has now taken in more than 48 million in North America, including 6.8 million over the weekend. "Yesterday" could collect as much as 150 million worldwide by the end of its run, box office analysts say not bad for a film that cost 26 million to make.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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The "black barbershop as sacred space" trope isn't new; it's made the rounds in Hollywood, the art world, academia and beyond. Unfortunately for Al, this week's visit to a no frills strip mall spot is steeped in none of the barbershop's fabled camaraderie, current events catch ups or stress release. When he stops in to get "the usual," what he gets instead is all the worst barbershop experiences rolled into one, then exaggerated to "Curb Your Enthusiasm" proportions and spun through the signature "Atlanta" absurdist filter. Whether you're a chair regular or a shop newbie, there are some cut day experiences that are universal. Tardiness, personal calls and mid cut snacking are all garden variety annoyances. From the moment that cape snaps up, you expect to hear about the barber's personal life and know full well you'll be forced to watch some viral clips on a smartphone. Al's barber does all of this in only the first three minutes. Played to shifty perfection by standup comedian Robert Powell III, the fast talking hustler Bibby traps Al in a bottle episode of sorts. They may not be bound to one specific location, but all of the action revolves around the two men making their way through a seemingly endless to do list. Bibby has barely cranked up his clippers when his phone starts ringing. His girl's making angry demands on the other end and he's quick to jump in his pickup truck to go placate her. Absurdly enough, he's successful at luring Al along on this "quick" detour. How could Al refuse? He has only 5 percent of a haircut, and the barber client code stipulates that he can't just jump into another chair and let someone else finish the job. No matter how fed up you are with the guy who tends your lines and edges, there's a loyalty there that's hard to shake.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Our guide to film series and special screenings happening this weekend and in the week ahead. All our movie reviews are at nytimes.com/reviews/movies. FAMILY F(R)ICTIONS: DYSFUNCTION FOR THE HOLIDAYS at the Quad Cinema (through Dec. 1). Breaking with the notion that holidays are a time for joy and cheer, the Quad has put together a lineup in which get togethers take place on a precipice of unease. Whatever happened at your Thanksgiving, it was probably less angsty than the reunion in Ingmar Bergman's "Autumn Sonata" (showing on Thursday and Saturday), a drama that casts the other Bergman Ingrid as a pianist whose distant daughter (Liv Ullmann) invites her for what promises to be a recrimination filled visit. Vincent Gallo plays an ex con who kidnaps a young woman (Christina Ricci) to play his wife in "Buffalo '66" (on Saturday). In "The Birdcage" (on Friday and Sunday), Mike Nichols's remake of "La Cage Aux Folles," Robin Williams and Nathan Lane attempt a different kind of ruse as a flamboyant gay couple trying to hide their lifestyle from their son's prospective father in law, a Republican senator (Gene Hackman). 212 255 2243, quadcinema.com
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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FLORENCE, Italy "More" is the order of the day at Pitti Uomo, the Italian men's wear trade fair where exhibitors cram the Fortezza da Basso in the center of the city in hopes of catching a buyer's eye. Once upon a time, suits ruled here, but that was long ago. The bustling fair still has plenty of Italian tailoring, but new pavilions have sprung up like mushrooms to cater to any and all variegated tastes. The area labeled "Born in the U.S.A. by Liberty Fairs" spotlights brands that are just that. "I Play" is inflected by athletic wear; "Unconventional" has a faintly gothic bent (officially, "Luxury Underground Style"). Throughout, you can find T shirts and track pants along with jackets and vests. At the fashion shows and presentations given by the fair's invited and sponsored guests, there is similar breadth. On Wednesday evening, those who wanted to sample the full menu of Pitti options made their way to a presentation by the Sicilian designer Fausto Puglisi before moving on to catch a show by the Russian designer Gosha Rubchinskiy. "So many buyers ask for it from me," Mr. Puglisi said, and some of his stores that carry his clothes report men buying oversize garb from the women's department for themselves. "When Pitti invited me to show the collection here, I said, let's do it." He cast a rough crew to model it, including local prison inmates, according to his press team, making a one night only appearance, and players of the ultraviolent Florentine sport calcio storico fiorentino, essentially a mix of rugby and football with a bit of bare knuckle brawling for good measure. Heavily tattooed and barely attired, the models wore leather Bermuda shorts decked with gold charms, tattered jeans and floral printed robes. By coincidence or kismet, Mr. Puglisi's name is a near anagram for "pugilist." As an inspiration, he cited Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian poet and filmmaker who died in 1975. Pasolini is an unexpected muse for a fashion designer; as a committed Marxist, he would likely have bristled at the connection. In an infamous interview before his death, he compared consumerism to Nazism and said that he considered it "to be a Fascism worse than the classical one." Nevertheless, Mr. Puglisi said, Pasolini, whose adaptations of "Oedipus Rex," "The Decameron" and the Marquis de Sade's "120 Days of Sodom" are grisly, lusty classics of Italian cinema, is "my obsession. For me, this is what I want to do as a designer." The designer Gosha Rubchinskiy at Manifattura Tabacchi, a former tobacco factory, where his fashion show took place. Chris Warde Jones for The New York Times Like the filmmaker, who often used nonprofessional actors and appreciated the rough and the rustic, Mr. Puglisi proclaimed his allegiance to outsiders. "Many times when I go to the south and talk to the simple people someone who's selling fish in the middle of the street we're talking and talking, and it gives you more than any celebrity or stylist," he said. Nearby, Mr. Rubchinskiy's show was about to begin, in the sun dappled courtyard of a former tobacco factory. Mr. Rubchinskiy offers a reclaimed Soviet chic, his logo an imposing block of Cyrillic and his models a gawky lot of pale teenagers, found via an Instagram search. He has been feverishly embraced by both young buyers and fashion editors, teenagers like those in his shows and "a wide following of adult men who still think of themselves as teenagers," The Financial Times wrote. And such is the elasticity of inspiration that Mr. Rubchinskiy, too, said he was most inspired by Pasolini. After the show, which mixed his usual collection with collaborations (in re reappropriated, black market gone real market style) with Fila, Kappa and Levi's, Mr. Rubchinskiy screened "The Day of My Death," a 17 minute film created for the occasion. It starred the designer; his stylist, Lotta Volkova; a handful of models; and Renata Litvinova, the Russian filmmaker who directed it. "We were inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini, his story, his poems, his films and finally his murder, which has been sealed for 10 years," Ms. Litvinova told Vogue. "His reputation was being blackened, and we decided to bring the justice back: Pier Paolo is a genius, an artist, who suffered for his principles." By sundown, copies of a paperbound book of black and white photos were appearing in possession of certain key fashion editors, packaged in a plain brown sleeve. Chilly and elegant, the photographs were shot by Mr. Rubchinskiy during the film shoot. The book is the designer's third with the London based publisher Idea Books, made in an edition of 1,000 and certain to be a collector's item among his most rabid fans. The book's only text, apart from its end credits, is this: "To Pier Paolo."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Ms. Rosenberg is a co founder of the Solutions Journalism Networ k, which supports rigorous reporting about responses to social problems. When I began reporting this article, before the pandemic, it was about an ingenious solution to a huge but hard to see problem: In many poor countries, most people get their grain from mom and pop local mills. But these mills don't fortify their flour with the basic nutrients that children (and others) need. That solution, which is important and hopeful, is still part of this story. But it has also become a tale of how Covid 19 kills in more than one way, including the terrible complexity of decisions of whether to reopen economies whose workers are desperate for an income. The case for letting people go back to work isn't just about individual liberty. The public health argument for speeding up recovery is that poverty too sickens and kills. A childhood in poverty can mean a lifetime of suffering. Wealthy countries can create a strong social safety net. France and Germany, for example, are replacing people's lost incomes. It's costly, but less costly than a recession. That could be the answer in America if we choose it. Outside of wealthy countries, you and your family must play the role of safety net, which means you go to work. "Poor people will prefer the lottery of infection over the certainty of starvation," Alex De Waal and Paul Richards wrote sadly in an article for BBC News. So here's the hopeful story: Every rich country fortifies food. Our diets lack certain nutrients, so governments require manufacturers to add them to certain foods. (Milk doesn't actually contain vitamin D until it's fortified. Froot Loops don't supply vitamin C without help.) If Americans need fortified foods, so much more do people who don't have the luxury of a varied diet. Most Tanzanians eat cornmeal mush, or ugali, every day. Many eat very little else. Ugali is filling. But it's not nutritious. A third of Tanzanian children are deficient in iron and vitamin A (which prevents blindness). Many also lack zinc, vitamin B12 and iodine, causing damage to their immune systems and cognitive development. Women lack folate, a deficiency that can lead to neural tube defects like spina bifida in their children at birth. Only two thirds of Tanzanian children grow to a normal height. And 130 children die of malnutrition every day; countless more are damaged for life. At a cost of 25 cents per person per year, fortifying food is by far the cheapest way to improve health. Better nutrition also increases economic productivity. Every dollar a country spends on fortification will reap 30 in economic benefits paid back. One problem is that the government only has only about 55 people to monitor all food and medicine issues nationwide. "Prioritizing fortification is a big challenge when the benefits are invisible," said Penjani Mkambula, the global program leader for fortification at the Geneva based Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. "If somebody eats unfortified food, it's still food. This is a hidden problem." The situation is even worse in the mom and pop village mills that produce 87 percent of all maize flour. "It was just too much money," said Philipo Kulwa, the chief operating officer of Lina Millers in Dar es Salaam, a medium size mill by Tanzanian standards. He said that in cities, many customers are aware of the benefits of fortification. "Sometimes people call and ask if our flour is fortified," he said. But Tanzania is overwhelmingly rural. "There, people have no idea about fortified foods," he said. "They just consider the price." At the end of 2018, Mr. Kulwa began working with Sanku, a nongovernmental organization. Sanku started as part of Project Healthy Children, which promotes large scale fortification. "We were working with governments at the policy level," said Felix Brooks church, an American based in Dar es Salaam who co founded Sanku (with Dave Dodson, a Stanford University lecturer, who is also a former Republican candidate in Wyoming for the U.S. Senate). "But 10 years in, we realized we were leaving out those arguably most at risk." In 2013, they created Sanku to work on small scale fortification. Other organizations have tried to help small mills fortify flour. That involved scooping the right amount of nutrients into flour by hand. "They gave up," Mr. Brooks church said. "Small scale fortification got a reputation as a waste of time." But Sanku invented new technology. It worked with Stanford to develop what it now calls a dosifier a machine that mixes the right amount of nutrients into the flour. Various organizations working in Africa now use Sanku's dosifier. The World Food Program employs it to fortify flour in refugee camps in Kenya and Tanzania, feeding several hundred thousand children. Sanku itself works directly with millers in Tanzania. Mr. Kulwa said that Sanku helped him get a grant for the dosifier. It supplies the nutrient mix at no cost. Sanku also trained him, monitors the equipment via a cellular link and comes back when there's a problem. Sanku also tackled a second challenge: a business model. "The cost of concentrated nutrients is not huge for small millers, but it's still material," Mr. Brooks church said. "They couldn't afford it or pass it on to consumers a mother in a village couldn't afford to pay more for a fortified product." Sanku's answer was to bundle the nutrient mix with something every miller needs flour sacks. Mr. Kulwa buys sacks from Sanku at market prices. Because Sanku buys in bulk, it can make enough on the sacks to throw in the vitamin mineral mix. Sanku tries to recruit millers by asking them to help their neighbors. "The first thing we say is, Do you want to be a health champion in your community?" Mr. Brooks church said. Of course, the miller says. The next question is invariably, What's it going to cost me? Mr. Brooks church tries to persuade them that they will make money. "Food fortification is a really hard concept to sell," he said. "But everybody knows what quality is." Most small mills also sell flour to the public. Mr. Brooks church tells millers that Sanku will help bring visible improvements to their mills and flour. Normal bags are simple gunny sacks with the mill's logo. Sanku's bags are shiny, with big pink stripes. "They have the logo of Tanzania's food agency," Mr. Brooks church said. "They look clean. We holistically try to make their business better." The government logo is particularly important, said James Flock, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development's Nafaka (cereals) program in Tanzania: "The trust that small scale farmers hold in government information is powerful." Nafaka aims to help farmers and millers professionalize, including adding fortification. It also creates markets for their improved flour. Between November and January, Nafaka tried sending regular texts to farmers (most of them female) about fortified flour and where to buy it. Recipients' purchase of fortified flour went from 5 percent to 30 percent. Another way Nafaka creates markets is by connecting millers to the government's school lunch programs. It worked with 37 millers to provide fortified flour to nearly 100 schools. Until now, that is. Covid 19 has closed schools, and with them, a regular source of nutrients for many children. Maize flour will be the last food Tanzanian families buy when they can buy nothing else. So fortification is more needed than ever. But it's risky. A miller who carried the virus could become a super spreader. Sanku has given all its millers health kits containing masks, gloves, alcohol rub and cleaner. Except for schools, Tanzania is largely open. People need to work today to eat today, and so in the markets it is business as usual. Buses are jammed. Many churches are full the president of Tanzania, John Magufuli, has told people that prayer can vanquish the disease. Tanzania, like most countries in Africa, is not equipped for the consequences. Many people have no water or soap. In hospitals, oxygen is in short supply. There are virtually no ventilators. Tanzanians can, however, wear masks. So Sanku has hired an army of workers to cut and sew its flour sacks into masks 10,000 so far. It has enough sacks to make millions of masks. Those polypropylene sacks embody the terrible dilemma of Covid 19: Should they be made into masks? Or hold fortified flour? Should they fight a virus? Or fight malnutrition? It is an impossible choice. But it's like the ones that billions of people must make. Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book "The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism." She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of "Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World" and the World War II spy story e book "D for Deception." To receive email alerts for Fixes columns, sign up here. 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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Kellye Nakahara, the actress best known for her recurring role as Nurse Kellye Yamato on the hit television series "M A S H," died on Sunday at her home in Pasadena, Calif. She was 73. Her son, William Wallett, said the cause was cancer. Ms. Nakahara, who was later known as Kellye Nakahara Wallett, appeared in 167 episodes of "M A S H," the acclaimed sitcom set in a mobile Army hospital during the Korean War. The series ran from 1972 to 1983 on CBS. She was originally an extra on the show. But, she said in a 2016 NPR interview, her role grew after she became friendly with the writers and crew. "I think I was in every scene," she said, "because I put myself in every scene and nobody told me to get out."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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As the curtain rises on George Balanchine's "Serenade," we're plunged into a drama about selflessness. Seventeen young women are all facing front, all dressed alike, all slowly going through a ritual that strikingly resembles that of religious devotees. In what follows as we watch loners; connections between individuals; kernel like groups of three, four and five; and suggestions of love, loss, consolation and transcendence we constantly see how lives are absorbed in something larger than private concerns. Dramatic interplay between self and selflessness occurs in many Balanchine ballets. On Tuesday night, New York City Ballet opened its six week season at the David H. Koch Theater with three of his ultimate classics: "Serenade" (1934 ), "Agon" (1957) and "Symphony in C" (1947). The central dances of "Agon," tense and dense, abound with radical style and peculiar incidents; but the opening and closing sections show that even the most singular of these performers is actually part of a large team. We enter the hive only to find it contains more than one queen bee. Each of the four movements of the grandly imperial "Symphony in C" features a very different ballerina; the structurally startling event is how, in the finale, the ballet brings these dissimilar divas side by side to dance the same steps. In each of these three works, the women are dressed identically; likewise the men. The collective matters more than the star, and the fascination of the pattern that includes them all matters most. Yet the human is never reduced to the status of a cog in a machine. Rather the opposite: Balanchine style and choreography maximize each dancer's energy. His are realms in which each person makes intense claims upon life. Ms. Hyltin petite, but with a physical amplitude that makes her register powerfully throughout the theater has become one of the most affecting presences in City Ballet's roster. In "Serenade," she currently dances the role of the ballet's heroine, the one around whom its rushing series of pure dance incidents acquires the strongest sense of narrative. She has vulnerability, along with ardor, delicacy but also sweep. On Tuesday, she was at her most touchingly impetuous; the successive strokes of fate that came her way were incidental to the brightness with which she seized on every step. Ms. Pereira, a dancer who has so often been lightweight and underpowered, was dancing with a stretched incisiveness that may yet make her a valuable artist. The tall and grand Ms. Reichlen who too often in 2014 seemed to be holding back delivered the hugest and most strikingly off balance images of the ballet. In one moment alone did I want more from her (the fault belongs to her coaches). In the ballet's final Elegy, she, holding the same full force arabesque, is rotated twice by the man kneeling at her feet (Ask la Cour); then she extends her front arm and upper body upward. Surely that stretch should rear higher, as if invoking the heavens? Those of us who saw Maria Calegari here can never forget the heroic drama she made of this. In "Agon" and "Symphony in C," the dancers looked awake, interesting, but not fully urgent. Whereas the conductor Clotilde Otranto gave life and breath to "Serenade," here the music (by Stravinsky in "Agon" and Bizet in "Symphony") gave no special propulsion to the dancers. Maria Kowroski and Amar Ramasar, in "Agon," gave what were almost marvelous performances. But the terrific blaze with which they opened the long pas de deux was not quite maintained. Andrew Veyette, leading that ballet's first pas de trois, never lacks force; what's sometimes missing here is elegance of spirit. Megan LeCrone, leading the second pas de trois, is an unresolved artist: alternately edgy and polite, flamboyant and guarded, but never radiant. The four ballerinas of "Symphony in C" all supplied reasons to look forward to this season. Ashley Bouder (first movement), sparkling and dashing, and Sara Mearns (second), a naturally dramatic and glamorous artist brilliantly attuned to the many layers of the music, are both now in their high summers. Brittany Pollack, making her debut in the notoriously hard fourth movement, displayed true brilliance. Lauren Lovette, leading the third movement, can often seem the loveliest woman in the company; her upper body style is intensely affecting, so that the turn of her head, the angle of her eyes and shoulders can all make immense impressions. And yet it's still not clear she is a Balanchine ballerina. In a fast, light role such as this, her technique lacks bite or thrust; her manner is winsomely charming, even passive, as if she believes her prime task is just to be sweetly pretty. At corps and demi soloist level, there was much to admire above all, in the alert, happy beauty of Meagan Mann and Claire Kretzschmar as the first movement's lieutenants. The company is in good shape though the dancing of both Chase Finlay (first movement) had its obvious blurs and that of Gonzalo Garcia (third movement) was bland. But the company's admirers had been hungry to greet its return to repertory; and on Tuesday only "Serenade" fully realized their my hopes. The latest in the company's strange series of art installations is the work of Dustin Yellin. Only one of his items in the Koch Theater, however, shows rewardingly charming fantasy: a brass hued curio at orchestra level. But the upstairs foyer is dominated by glass cases containing humanlike figures. The quest for any one exhibit worth contemplating proves a wild goose chase.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Credit...Louisa Marie Summer for The New York Times SALZBURG, Austria On a recent afternoon here, Krzysztof Warlikowski sat on a roof terrace, tousling his mane of hair and drawing deeply on a vape pen. Behind him were the spire of a church where Mozart prayed and the hills made famous by "The Sound of Music." Just as the louche clouds of vapor he expelled jarred against the idyllic Salzburg landscape, so Mr. Warlikowski's theater and opera productions have been sexy, cerebral interlopers on some of Europe's grandest stages over the past 20 years. This Polish director was in town preparing a new production of Richard Strauss's "Elektra," which is scheduled to have its premiere at the Salzburg Festival on Aug. 1. His stagings have sometimes divided audiences, though his work is always highly anticipated even more so here in this pandemic year, when his "Elektra" will be one of the few shows in town. A typical Salzburg Festival features up to 10 new opera productions; this year, because of coronavirus restrictions, the original program of eight fully staged works has been scaled down to just two, "Elektra" and Mozart's "Cosi Fan Tutte." It is also a perfect work for Mr. Warlikowski, 58, who has been drawn time and again to the myths of ancient Greece that are the basis of "Elektra." Mr. Warlikowski said he was fascinated by the brutal themes of these stories: "It's matricide, it's infanticide, it's patricide, it's incest, it's eating the body of your own children." As recounted in plays by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, Electra's mother, Clytemnestra, murders her husband as revenge for him killing another of their daughters many years earlier. But the opera, which focuses on father adoring Electra's plot to murder her mother, doesn't include this explanation for Clytemnestra's original act. There is, Mr. Warlikowski said, no moment "when Clytemnestra would say to Electra: 'Yes, I did kill your father because he killed my daughter, and your sister.'" Mr. Warlikowski's treatment of the classics isn't just about fleshing out their psychological motivations. He also wants to show how these ancient stories can resonate now. In 1997, he staged Sophocles's "Electra" in a setting that many critics recognized as the former Yugoslavia, a war zone at the time; for his Paris Opera debut, in 2006, he set Gluck's "Iphigenie en Tauride," an opera about Electra's murdered sister, in a contemporary retirement home. His most ambitious engagement with ancient Greek texts so far has been his 2009 work "(A)pollinia." A collage assembled from snippets of classical tragedies, as well as reflections on the murder of Jews in Poland during World War II, it was developed at the Nowy Teatr, a theater Mr. Warlikowski founded in Warsaw in 2008. "The thing was to make a tragedy on the level of tragedy of the Holocaust," Mr. Warlikowski said. "It was a period in Poland when the public wasn't used to discussing this," he added. "And so I was doing shows which are like a public discussion." Every production Mr. Warlikowski has staged has been a collaboration with Malgorzata Szczesniak, a designer he met at college in Krakow in the early 1980s. She has created a signature austere look for his shows, with lots of hard, reflective surfaces and clinical lighting: The stage for "Elektra," for example, is wrapped in a wall of polished steel, and features a huge, movable plexiglass box. This might not surprise those who saw his 2001 "Hamlet," in which the title character got naked and lusted after Horatio, or who remember drag queens in his "Taming of the Shrew." Although Mr. Warlikowski has discussed his sexuality openly with foreign news media, he avoids the subject when speaking with Polish journalists, who often prefer not to ask. "Yes, I am gay, but first I am a human being," Mr. Warlikowski said. "And I think the gay thing, it's becoming less and less important in my life." Mr. Warlikowski and Ms. Szczesniak lived with the prominent Polish actor Jacek Poniedzialek in the 1990s, when he was Mr. Warlikowski's lover. They now live in Warsaw and Palermo, Italy with the French dancer Claude Bardouil, who choreographs their productions, and who is also in Salzburg working on "Elektra." Mr. Warlikowski who was born in Szczecin, near the Polish border with Germany met Ms. Szczesniak in a philosophy class at the Jagiellonian University. After graduating, they went to Paris when travel restrictions were lifted in the late 80s thaw that preceded the end of communism. They were poor there, Ms. Szczesniak said, but happy: They sat in the cheap seats at the opera, visited museums and hung out in parks and cafes. In 1989, the pair returned to Krakow and enrolled at the Ludwik Solski Academy for the Dramatic Arts. There, Mr. Warlikowski studied with Krystian Lupa, a towering figure in Polish theater who makes long, slowly unfolding works based on literary texts. In an interview, Mr. Lupa said that a student production by Mr. Warlikowski, drawn from the writings of Proust, marked him as a rising talent. "I felt there and then that Krzysztof Warlikowski was going to be a distinguished director," he said. This potential was not always seen by Polish critics, many of whom found Mr. Warlikowski's early work too strongly influenced by his teacher. "The umbilical cord of our student pedagogue relationship had not yet been severed," Mr. Lupa said. But, he added, the first inklings of Mr. Warlikowski's mature style were already clear in those 1990s shows, particularly an enduring fascination with "perverse, unobvious, not straightforward situations, where one person inflicts pain on another." His stark, bloody 1997 staging of Sophocles's "Electra," his Warsaw debut, was poorly reviewed. Looking back in 2004, however, the critic Maciej Nowak wrote in the theater journal Notatnik Teatralny that, in that production, Polish theater "made contact with what was happening on the stages of Western Europe." By the time Mr. Warlikowski staged his first important opera Verdi's "Don Carlos," in its French version, at the Polish National Opera in 2000 he was beginning to be celebrated as an original voice, though still a provocative one. The 2001 "Hamlet" in which Mr. Poniedzialek (pronounced pon ya JOW ek), in the title role, took his clothes off, was shocking when it played in Poland, and many audience members walked out, said Piotr Gruszczynski, a dramaturg who works with Mr. Warlikowski. "Of course, he's getting older," Mr. Poniedzialek added. "I think he's much more mature and much deeper now, talking about the human condition." Although Mr. Warlikowski had become wiser with age, Mr. Poniedzialek said, the director was still like "a little prince" "closed in his own bubble" and needed strong figures around him to help him realize his creative potential. Karolina Ochab, a Polish theater impresario and the general manager of the Nowy Teatr, said she agreed Mr. Warlikowski was more a dreamer than an organizer, but noted, "For artists, this is normal." Mr. Poniedzialek said Mr. Warlikowski is very strong, and stubborn. "But on the other hand, he's also very fragile," he added. "It can really destroy him if the performance doesn't go right, if actors are frustrated, if reviews are roasting him." In the interview, Mr. Warlikowski focused his ire more on a certain subset of star struck audience members. "The worst public in the opera are these obsessed gays," he said. "All these rich guys with nothing to do in their life, just following Anna Netrebko or Jonas Kaufmann on all continents. This is not a real audience for me." People like this, he said, and audience expectations of opera that there will be pyramids in "Aida," for example can make the art form into a prison. But, he added, "If you are in prison, you must find a way to come out of the prison in order to make you free."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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When I would tell people that drawing saved my life, I thought I was being hyperbolic. Then the coronavirus hit. Drawing had helped me survive another very dark period of my life, earlier. Could it now be helping me to stay healthy? I know it is keeping me sane, as it did five years ago when I was out of work. I had been an editor at The New Yorker for more than two decades. The internet changed my job slowly and then quickly, and then I was out. Frustrated and adrift middle aged men who lose their jobs in shrinking industries are not just a danger to themselves, they are capable of putting everyone at risk. I knew I had to do something, fast, and I tried neurofeedback. I spent about a year and a half with wires strapped to my head while listening to classical music and staring at undulating bar graphs on a computer. It was odd, but I felt calmer. That could have been placebo effect, but I also experienced a physical change. A few months after starting, I noticed my eyes filling with tears, and I started crying for the first time since junior high. I didn't cry when my dog died as a teenager or when my father died, 12 years ago. But there I was, tears running down my cheeks in a darkened office on West End Avenue. Neurofeedback helped me manage the stress of losing my job, but my severance package wasn't unlimited and I had to give up the therapy, which was expensive. At that point, I had been drawing casually for years, practicing on my commute to work. Suddenly spending more time drawing was easy because I was out of work. Or I should say necessary because I was out of work, which meant I was left taking care of my kids, then in elementary school, as well as the laundry, the food shopping and the housecleaning while my wife went to her office. I found that drawing even the most mundane thing like a pair of shoes helped me relax. If it looked like we were going to be late for a doctor's appointment or a soccer game, for example, I was less likely to get frustrated if I took a moment to capture the curving metal of the radiator in the living room or the backpack that was sitting in the hall. While I waited for everyone to get ready, time seemed to expand and slow. There was quiet in the house, and in my soul. I liked to cook and was comfortable spending time in the kitchen, so I started drawing my dish rack every night. I now have more than a thousand renditions of my dish rack. Sometimes, especially during the lockdown, depending on how stressful things are, I draw it two or three times a day. These days, if I'm irritable at home and getting on my wife's nerves which is still a constant risk, for my recent personal growth has been matched by my children running smack into their teenage years she'll say to me, "Do you want to go do some drawing?" or "Have you done your dish rack yet, dear?" By the time I'm done with a sketch, it is as if I'm a new man. This is partly because drawing has taught me to make the most of my mistakes. I work in ink, from life. It is as if every line is already out of place from the start. It is oddly liberating, as I have learned to forgive myself. I draw not for the result but for the process, and fortunately I've been doing it long enough that the results are pleasing. I love capturing the three dimensional image on the two dimensional page. If Wordsworth's heart leapt up when he beheld a rainbow in the sky, mine jumps when I convincingly foreshorten the handle of a frying pan, and it rises off the page. There's scientific evidence for the health benefits of a drawing practice. A 2016 study at Drexel University found significantly lower levels of cortisol after 45 minutes of making art. The body typically releases cortisol, a hormone made in the adrenal gland, in response to danger, which is great if you are being chased by a lion or a tiger. "However, if you are constantly feeling stressed, which is perceived as a threat by your brain, your cortisol levels will consistently be high," Girija Kaimal, the author of the study, said. "If you're constantly on high alert, it puts a lot of pressure on your heart. It takes away resources from your digestive system. A series of chronic health conditions can develop if you're not able to feel relaxed and not able to regulate down the cortisol in your body." Making art has other advantages. In a 2017 study, Dr. Kaimal demonstrated that coloring, doodling and free drawing activate the medial prefrontal cortex, the seat of so called executive function, and improve self perceptions of problem solving. It doesn't take much effort to yield results. A 2019 study by Jennifer Drake at Brooklyn College found that a mere 10 minutes of drawing improved participants' moods. And skill or talent are not factors: All the studies mentioned involved a random selection of people, not artists per se. In fact, it's not just making art that improves health and mood. Almost any hobby or act of leisure helps. A 2013 study at Pennsylvania State University found that gardening, sewing, completing puzzles and other relaxing activities lowered blood pressure. A 2015 study at the University of Merced revealed that individuals who engaged in leisure reported improved moods and less stress and exhibited lower heart rates. What matters is how we engaged we are in the activities. "The thing that came out in the studies was this: 'How much are you able to get outside of your head?'" Matthew J. Zawadzki, the lead author of the studies, said. "You don't need to be a perfect drawer to enjoy the activity or to reap the mood benefits," Dr. Drake pointed out. All you really need is a pen and paper and a bit of time. "Doodling is one thing that somehow has escaped that stigma of whether I'm skilled or not," Dr. Kaimal said. "It's important to let go of any fear that might be holding you back from engaging in the hobby," Dr. Drake said. Dr. Zawadzki has a tip that evokes the medical value of a hobby. "Write yourself a prescription that says, 'I'm going to take 10 minutes, three times a week. That is my time,'" he suggested. "When we come back from doing leisure, we're often re engaged, we're better able to concentrate and we're in a better mood, so the first thing is to give yourself permission to do it." If you do make a practice of your hobby, who knows what you'll accomplish. For the past three years, I've drawn at least twice a day first thing in the morning, and again before I go to bed and,when I'm lucky, and now that I'm sheltering in place, as many times as I can in between. As a result of the peace of mind it brings me, I found a whole new career as a grant writer for a Brooklyn based human services nonprofit. I started selling prints of my work to people all over the world, landed a three book deal with a major art book publisher, and spent the past two summers in Paris and London sketching. I knew that drawing could change my mood. When I started doing it on a regular basis, I discovered it could change my life. It may now be keeping me out of the hospital, or more. John Donohue is the author of "All the Restaurants in New York."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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In his Aug. 9 review of J. Alison Rosenblitt's new book on E. E. Cummings, David Bromwich finds "plausible" that Cummings's rearrangements were due to dyslexia. While many creative people are inspired by their disabilities, Cummings was unlikely dyslexic. He said his first rhyme at 3; was composing letters, a diary and poems before he was 6; and wrote illustrated stories by 7 and virtuoso prose by 12. True, he disliked arithmetic. He excelled at Cambridge Latin School and was a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, which he entered at 16. He sometimes made mistakes in French, Jon Grossman told me. Linguisticians have discussed the complexity of his inventions. Especially I would resist citing "r p o p h e s s a g r" in the context of dyslexia. Cummings did not misspell. He was precise and never permitted editing. This unique rearrangement of letters appears in a delightful poem observing a grasshopper's impetuous hopping, rearranging himself! The author is a founding editor of SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society. In David Bromwich's superb review of "The Beauty of Living," he recites two related little known facts about E. E. Cummings that arguably might accord the poet even greater fame than his innovative influence on American poetry.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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BASEL, Switzerland Strapped into a cockpit style seat, eyes peering through heavy black goggles, you can almost feel the G force as you hurtle down the bobsled run, seat rattling and shoulders slamming as you tilt through violent twists and turns. As soon as you catch your breath, you're on to the next near death experience, plunging through deepest outer space, feeling your stomach muscles tighten as you tip into a 90 degree abyss. The ride may have been a virtual reality promotion for Samsung's Gear smartwatches at the 100th anniversary of the giant Baselworld watch fair, which closes Thursday, but it was not a bad metaphor for the watch industry in general of late. Since the 2008 9 economic meltdown, the watch industry has soared to heady highs (thanks, China) and hit pockets of turbulence (thanks, China), with numerous unforeseen detours along the way. While the wild ride is anything but over, the titans of timepieces did their best to stave off motion sickness and enjoy the biggest, brassiest watch show on earth. For one magical week each year, the Champagne flows and the celebrities pose as the watch industry makes its pilgrimage to northern Switzerland to revel in its own horological brand of spring fever. Baselworld, for those who don't know a tourbillon from a perpetual calendar, is the watch industry's equivalent of the Olympics eight days of fierce competition mixed with globally themed pageantry. More than 100,000 nattily attired watch lovers, retailers and journalists (yes, even the journalists dress up) representing more than 100 countries stroll a shopping mall size exhibition hall to check out the latest glimmering wares from hundreds of brands in lavishly appointed booths (that is, "booths," since some could double as upscale boutique hotels outfitted with Ginza worthy lounges). Baselworld, in other words, is an extraterrestrial setting where a 3,000 timepiece actually passes for entry level and recession seems like a concern for beings from another planet. Typically, that is. "We're looking now at year three of a downturn for Swiss exports," said Joe Thompson, the editor of WatchTime magazine and a prominent industry analyst. The avuncular editor, a dead ringer for Alan Alda, rattled off challenges that have shaken the industry: a plunge in oil prices that shook demand in Russia and the Middle East; a crackdown on the age old practice of, ahem, "gifting" among Chinese businessmen and government officials; financial crises in the eurozone; "Brexit." Even America has been a cipher. Despite stock market highs and a new president who promised huge tax cuts to the wealthy (a.k.a., the buyers of five and six figure wristwatches), Swiss watch exports to the United States tumbled 26 percent in February, compared with a year ago, according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry. "There is great uncertainty here," Mr. Thompson said, and he should know, having covered the fair since the late 1970s. He was not the only industry sage to detect a more muted tone. "The crowds are thinner, the watches less daring and expensive, the egos firmly in check," said Benjamin Clymer, the founder of the influential watch site Hodinkee, who was enjoying cocktails to the extent anyone actually "enjoys" a 28 cocktail with colleagues at the Les Trois Rois hotel on the banks of the Rhine on Friday night. In a year when a number of familiar brands including Girard Perregaux, Bremont, Ulysse Nardin and Shinola made other plans, many brands that did turn out emphasized bang for the buck, which is a big change from years past. Zenith, for instance, which is undergoing a makeover by Jean Claude Biver, the president of the LVMH watch division and one of the industry's noted turnaround artists, trumpeted "aggressive" price cuts in its product presentations. The Pilot Type 20 Extra Special model, for example, was slashed to 5,700, from 7,100 (which is not exactly cheap, granted). "I was encouraged, if not a little amused, by how often the word 'value' was used in presentations this year," Mr. Clymer said. "Certainly, a 39,000 perpetual calendar in platinum from Hermes does feel like a 'great value' relative to an 82,000 perpetual calendar in white gold from Patek Philippe when you look at them on paper." "But," he added, "trying to assert a rational argument to a watch collector about quality and value is wasted breath. The halls of Baselworld are the last place on earth where 'value' has meaning." Even so, fairgoers did not seem willing to let a little belt tightening spoil the party. As usual, the giants of the industry held lavish events. Aristocratic Rolex served fine Bordeaux and goat cheese at the Reithalle Wenkenhof, the 18th century estate where the tennis champion Roger Federer, a Basel native, happened to get married in 2009. Populist Seiko, celebrating its premium Grand Seiko line, showcased the vocal stylings of its chief executive, Shinji Hattori, who took the stage at the Radisson Blu to belt out "Rock Around the Clock" and "Diana" in an Elvis worthy croon.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Even as millions of Americans are on lockdown in their homes, some people are still traveling to vacation spots, drawn by cheap airfares, the hope of riding out the pandemic in someplace less populated, or both. In Hawaii, statistics show that arrivals, which have been trending down since late February, largely led by a steep drop in visitors from Japan, remained, as of March 16, at about 80 percent of last year's figures. But a growing number of tourist destinations across the country are sending their own message to potential visitors: Stay home. From Hawaii and Moab, Utah, to the Outer Banks, N.C., and a small island in Maine, local authorities are urging travelers to reconsider trips that are not essential. Even permanent residents in popular second home locations like the Hamptons, in New York, aren't always welcoming the influx of people who own vacation houses. "Tourists are still coming in," said Julie Ohashi, 36, a Maui resident, in a telephone interview on Friday. She founded the Facebook group Maui Covid 19 Facts about a month ago, and has been protesting at the island's airport with signs urging visitors to go home. On March 17, Hawaii's governor, David Ige, asked travelers to postpone trips for 30 days. "The actions I'm announcing today may seem extreme to some of you, and we know that it will have negative effects to our economy. But we are confident that taking aggressive actions now will allow us to have a quicker recovery when this crisis is over," Governor Ige said in a news release. Travel is the leading economic driver in Hawaii. Last year, more than 10 million visitors arrived in the state, spending 17.8 billion, according to the state's Department of Business, Economic Development Tourism. But in the coronavirus era, restrictions are mounting, and on Saturday, Governor Ige announced a 14 day self quarantine beginning March 26 for both visitors and returning residents. Curfews and mandatory closures of restaurants bars and nightclubs for indoor service have been enacted in Honolulu, on the island of Kauai and in the County of Maui. Hawaii County has issued guidance that restaurants, bars and places of worship may make their own decisions to open or close, and consider ways to minimize risk to customers and employees. In the days preceding the announcement of the quarantine, the governor had requested that people postpone their visits, "but these aren't people who will respond to a request," Ms. Ohashi said while sharing screen shots of heated online debates between incoming travelers and islanders and photos, including one of a tourist raising her middle finger to the protesters, and Facebook comments like "Airline tickets are cheap. It's exactly why we booked just a week ago. See you soon ..." In a letter to tourism industry leaders on Wednesday, Chris Tatum, the president and chief executive of the Hawaii Tourism Authority, referred to the island's limited medical capacity. As of March 21, the state had 48 Covid 19 cases. "We are concerned about the limits of our health care system to adequately care for our community. Visitors putting their plans on hold for the next 30 days will allow our health care providers to manage this pandemic," he wrote. That's the worry of many tourism dependent communities that don't have the hospital beds necessary in the event of an outbreak. On March 16, the 17 bed Moab Regional Hospital in Moab, Utah, a popular adventure destination in southern Utah and the gateway to Canyonlands and Arches national parks, wrote to the Utah governor, Gary Herbert, asking him to shut down tourism businesses to deter visitors. The letter signed by five hospital executives, called the town " small ... cruise ship small ... with similar isolation and limitations in resources." The next day, the Southeast Utah Health Department instituted a 30 day ban on overnight lodging for nonessential visitors. The parks remain open, and though visitor's centers are closed, outside exhibits help visitors with logistics. Of those traveling, many are trying to shelter at second homes where social distancing might be easier than in a city. Rick Mordesovich, 54, a wealth manager from San Francisco, and his husband moved a week ago to their house in Sonoma, Calif., where they regularly spend weekends. "We decided we'd stay for a couple of weeks til it blew over, but now it looks like four to eight weeks," he said, referring to the shelter in place order issued by the County of Sonoma on March 17. Second home owners can still get to their properties on the string of barrier islands known as the Outer Banks in North Carolina, though Dare County has restricted access to residents, nonresident property owners and employees of local businesses by using checkpoints. "From our perspective, we consider this pause in visitation to hopefully save some lives," said Lee Nettles, the executive director of the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau. Colorado's tourism industry has been rocked in the middle of ski season March 15 to be precise when the state's ski resorts were shut down as Covid 19 cases appeared to spike across mountain towns, which are popular with skiers worldwide. In Aspen alone, 10 Australians tested positive for Covid 19 and were quarantined. "We are challenged in our town more than many places in the world because of all our visitors from across the globe and also because we like to travel as well. All of this increases our potential for exposure to the virus," wrote Jim Schmidt, the mayor of Crested Butte, in a message to the community dated March 14. The state of Colorado now recommends that visitors "should seriously consider canceling nonessential travel," according to its Covid 19 state website.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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9 Things We Still Want to Know Now That 'Game of Thrones' Is Over This article contains spoilers for the series finale of "Game of Thrones." We couldn't expect every question to be answered, every subplot to be resolved, every character to get a proper goodbye. But Sunday's "Game of Thrones" finale certainly tried to tie a bow on as much of the story as possible. Still, a lot of questions were left unanswered fodder, perhaps, for any "Game of Thrones" sequels that may arise in addition to the prequels. (Arya west of Westeros? John north of the North?) Here are a few we're still wondering about. Read the recap of the "Game of Thrones" series finale. Why Is There a Night's Watch? "There's still a Night's Watch?" Jon Snow asked Tyrion when he learned he was being banished to the Wall. Fair question. The White Walkers are wiped out. The wildlings are allies. The Wall is destroyed near Eastwatch, and the various castles along the Wall are unmanned. Is there any point in restoring them? Eastwatch at least, given its seaside location, could be rebuilt as a port town and trading center. In any case, it's not entirely clear what someone sentenced to the Night's Watch might be required to do. What is its function now beyond leading the Free Folk home? We got to see Ned Stark's companion Howland Reed only in the Tower of Joy flashback, and we heard about his legendary exploits only when Bran Stark discussed them with the Three Eyed Raven and the Reed siblings. What happened to that guy? In addition to being one of the few people in Westeros who knows Jon Snow's true parentage (not from a vision, but from lived history), Lord Reed is also a loyal vassal to House Stark so loyal that his children, Jojen and Meera, risked their lives to help Bran on his mystical journey. And yet House Reed was absent from the discussions about defending Winterfell, and it hasn't been heard from since Bran brushed off Meera with barely a thank you. We're still wondering about Jojen's visions, which suggested a fiery exit for Bran and Meera: "This isn't the end," he said. "Not for you. Not yet." Fans of 'Game of Thrones' griped about the finale's pointy end. Dorne Is Not Done Very late in the game, we got a brief mention from Varys that there was a new prince of Dorne. But who is he? How did he come to power when all the men in the Martell line were thought to have been assassinated by Ellaria Sand and the Sand Snakes? That's true of all the men mentioned in the show. But there are more in the books, among them Quentyn Martell. Since the show didn't properly identify this new prince, are we expected to assume that it's Quentyn? Who Was the Voice in the Flames? Varys never got to learn what the voice in the flames said when a sorcerer used his body parts in a magical ritual. Kinvara once offered to tell him, but never did. And now we'll never know. We never really got to visit many of the places in this world, but of the few we did, it would have been nice to learn what happened to a few of the locals we met along the way. In Pentos, for example, did Illyrio Mopatis, who hosted Viserys and Dany in Season 1 and Varys and Tyrion in Season 5, regret supporting a Targaryen restoration? In Qarth, did Quaithe, who seemed to have the power of premonition, ever take one last mystic look at Dany? In Braavos, did Jaqen H'ghar, who taught Arya much of her craft, ever hear about the exploits of his favorite pupil? In Meereen, did Daario Naharis succeed in keeping the peace, despite having no real interest in doing so? Did Salladhor Saan ever recover the ships that Stannis borrowed? So many of these ancillary characters and their subplots were discarded by the show as it narrowed its focus and lost interest in the lands across the Narrow Sea. Back in Season 6, Arya wondered, "What's west of Westeros?" and now that is her destination. Anything across the Sunset Sea is uncharted territory. The only known voyage there in the books was led by Elissa Farman, whom Dany had to thank for her dragon eggs, which Elissa stole from Dreamfyre to finance her trip. Elissa long believed that there were undiscovered lands west of Westeros, and her crew first sailed south by southwest and found three exotic islands. She then headed west and was never seen again. Her ship, however, was spotted many years later in Asshai, which suggested that it might be possible to reach Essos by sailing west from Westeros. Perhaps one of the prequel successor shows will clear this up. Or maybe Arya will get her own spinoff. Despite not having mentioned his wife for many years, Davos is still a married man as far as we know. Effectively, he abandoned his wife to go off to war with Stannis, then with Jon Snow, then with Dany. But did he return home to her after the Battle of Blackwater to share her grief over the death of their only son? No. Before he joined Stannis in Braavos, did he send a raven to let his wife know when he'd be home (and perhaps surprise her with his newly acquired literacy)? No. When Jon Snow first took him to Dragonstone to meet with Dany, did Davos ask that they take a slight detour so he could check in at home? No. (Although he did find time to flirt with Missandei.) In all his travels back and forth across the continent, did Davos express concern for his wife at all? No. Isn't it strange that a man who cares so deeply for others treating Shireen like a daughter, Gendry like a son never brings up his own family? We can only imagine the reception when he finally goes home. Among his many exploits, Sam Tarly killed a White Walker, and then a Thenn, and then stole several books from the restricted section of the Citadel library. Did the maesters ever notice they were missing? Will he face any repercussions for this theft? Did becoming grand maester erase his late fees? Also, if Sam helped Archmaester Ebrose write "The Chronicles of the Wars Following the Death of King Robert I," now titled "A Song of Ice and Fire," why wouldn't Tyrion be mentioned? It seems that much of what we've learned about the true history of Westeros may remain hidden from its people. The baker at the Inn at the Crossroads knows how to bring people together. Will he ever get to play the game of scones?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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For artists, the new pandemic reality means canceled exhibitions, day job uncertainty, and fears of an industrywide contraction. Like everyone else, they're trying to adjust. But those lucky enough to be working are also rethinking their practices, pivoting to new forms, media and colors to describe a troubled new world. We are checking in with some of them about what's changing in their studios, starting with the Irish American painter Sean Scully. With work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and London's Tate, Mr. Scully is most famous for paintings of deceptively simple geometries, especially broad stripes. (He once identified himself to a MoMA desk attendant by saying, "Sean Scully's my name, painting stripes is my game.") But wavering brushwork and unexpected colors infuse those stripes with more passion than you'd think they could bear. By FaceTime, we mostly talked about another longstanding series of his, paintings with rectangular cutouts that he calls "windows." These are edited excerpts from the conversation. No, I don't worry about anything. I had a show in Taos delayed. There's about five exhibitions of mine that are being either canceled or kicked up the road. Why are you making art in light of the pandemic? I've always thought of art as extremely positive as I said to you, there's no irony in me. I make art out of pure passionate belief, and it's very important as a kind of example of what's possible against all the things I'm against, first one being war. So what has changed in your painting in the last couple of months? The window that I put into my work went black. That's the first time I've done that, and it's the first time I've been able to. You weren't able to do it earlier? In the late '80s, I started to put a lot of windows into the paintings, and they were real windows. I did try to leave some one color, and I don't know what it was, whether it was my emotion, my insecurity, my need to do something else first, or the general climate swirling around me, but I was unable to make a solid color insert happen. You know, my work is always based on metaphor, so the meaning of black didn't touch me as true at that time. It was only now when I returned to this window idea that I could see them as black, because of what's in the air. It's easier to make art now than it was after my son Paul died. I was unable to work. You know, I really did lose my mind. The terrible thing about that is that when you're crazy, you don't really think you are. In an art or style context, there's something triumphant or powerful about the color black. But if there's no irony in you, can I assume this new black window is an expression of despair? I think what I'm trying to do is make myself, and anybody who's prepared to look at my work, look at two things at the same time because that's what we've got. We have what we idealistically imagine, which is represented by this seductive painting, and what we actually have, which is a blacked out view, a very uncertain, hard view. The colorful stripes are definitely beguiling. So if we succeed in looking at the two things at once, what does that do? The consequence is that you can actually think. Pause To think you have to be dialectical. It's actually what women have been accusing men of for a long time, not being able to see both sides at once, which Joni Mitchell writes about in one of her songs, "Both Sides, Now."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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LONDON The Vienna State Opera on Friday removed all responsibilities from Simona Noja Nebyla, the managing director of its historic ballet academy. The move came just days after an independent commission said the academy had endangered the well being of its students. The academy had given its students "insufficient medical and therapeutic care," the commission, which was set up by the Austrian government, said in a report issued on Tuesday. There also seemed to be "no awareness" that it had a responsibility for its students' health. The decision to effectively dismiss Ms. Noja Nebyla was announced in a news release on Friday by the company that oversees all of Austria's federal theaters. The commission was set up in April after allegations of physical and mental abuse at the academy were revealed by Falter, an Austrian newsmagazine.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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In today's political climate, even pizza, bourbon and coffee can be partisan issues. A year after the presidential election, a range of advertisers are learning that it doesn't take much sometimes just a single Twitter post to land them in the middle of a social media firestorm that splits along party lines. In some cases, they land there even if they've done nothing. And it has become clear in the past month that long used strategies for how brands should respond to the ensuing outrage may need rewriting. Last week, consumers shared videos of themselves destroying Keurig coffee machines after the company said it would pull ads from Sean Hannity's Fox News program, a decision based on the supportive comments the host made about Roy S. Moore, the embattled Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama. Earlier this month, the hashtag BoycottJimBeam emerged after the actress Mila Kunis, a spokeswoman for the liquor company since 2014, said on "Conan" that she has been donating to Planned Parenthood under Vice President Mike Pence's name in a form of "peaceful protest." And Papa John's has been renouncing the support of white supremacists and apologizing for appearing divisive after its chief executive said on an earnings call that the National Football League's handling of the national anthem controversy had hurt its pizza sales. As the national conversation has become increasingly fractured, major brands have repeatedly found themselves in the middle of these kinds of controversies, often stoked by posts or comments on Twitter and Facebook. Such social media pressure has prompted brands to pull advertisements from "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News, after reports that Bill O'Reilly reached settlements with multiple women who had accused him of harassment, and from New York's Public Theater's production of "Shakespeare in the Park" that featured a look alike of President Trump as Caesar. But seeming to take sides can have business implications as well, and companies are still struggling to adjust to the new normal. "What I think is constantly surprising is how polarized and divisive, certainly, the U.S. has become," said Ken Kraemer, the chief executive of the agency Deep Focus. Brands are shifting from a world where they avoided politics at all costs, he said, to one where younger consumers want to know that their "values are aligned." "This is something consumers and future consumers care about," he said, "but then again, there are very real business repercussions for expressing those points of view." Often, such situations seem impossible to predict. The backlash against Keurig stemmed from a tweet by the company saying that it would pull ads from Mr. Hannity's program after the host seemed to justify Mr. Moore's reported conduct involving teenage girls by calling one of the encounters "consensual." Mr. Hannity later said he "misspoke" though went on to discuss the possibility of Mr. Moore's accusers lying for money or political purposes. Keurig's chief executive stood by the company's decision in an email to employees, but said that sharing the information in a tweet was "done outside of company protocols," and apologized for any negativity that employees endured from the "appearance of 'taking sides.'" As the Keurig situation unfolded, some brands like Realtor.com and Volvo Car USA deleted tweets that said the companies were pulling ads from the show. That was apparent on Jim Beam's Facebook page after Ms. Kunis appeared on "Conan." She said on the show that her donations to Planned Parenthood in Mr. Pence's name were "a reminder that there are women out there in the world that may or may not agree with his platform." As a clip of her appearance spread online, a BoycottJimBeam effort began. At the same time, others expressed their support for the brand. A flood of comments appeared on various Facebook posts from Jim Beam, including a post about an event promoting a new vanilla flavored bourbon. "I love Mila for taking a stand for women's healthcare!!!" one woman posted on Nov. 8, adding, "She's inspired me to buy my first bottle of Jim Beam!" Below that, another poster said that "due to Mila Kunis political stunt," she would "no longer purchase your product!!" 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Jim Beam has declined to comment on its partnership with Ms. Kunis. Mike Proulx, chief digital officer of the ad agency Hill Holliday, said that companies have faced boycott threats for "as long as brands have existed." While social media now enables consumers "to express their thoughts and opinions instantly, openly and publicly," that doesn't necessarily mean the amount of conflict is unprecedented, he said. "The question back to all of us is is it that different from what was happening in the '60s?" Mr. Proulx said. "Or other moments in history where tensions were very, very high?" Boycott threats and advertising decisions have often provided some insight into the cultural battles playing out in the country. An article in The New York Times in 1963, for instance, reported that companies like Procter Gamble and Colgate Palmolive were casting more African Americans in their ads because they feared losing business from potential boycotts. Still, one company received more than 2,000 letters protesting such casting. In 1992, Sprint was asked if it would continue to work with the actress Candice Bergen, who played "Murphy Brown," after then Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the character in a speech for having a son out of wedlock. And as recently as 2004, companies like Lowe's dropped ads from "Desperate Housewives" because it was viewed as too racy. Papa John's found itself in unpleasant territory after John Schnatter, the chief executive, said on an earnings call that the N.F.L. hurt his company's sales by "not resolving the current debacle" with players who refuse to stand for the national anthem. That resulted in a wave of criticism, given that the gesture is a protest against racial injustice. The comments also prompted skepticism, since other advertisers said they had not been adversely affected. The situation escalated when a white supremacist website decided to endorse Papa John's for the comments similar to the one that the shoe company New Balance found itself in a year ago, when a company official said that "we feel things are going to move in the right direction" under Mr. Trump. Papa John's distanced itself from the group. Last week, the brand took to Twitter to clarify its position, reiterate its distaste for "neo Nazis" and apologize to those who found the remarks about the N.F.L. to be "divisive." It added, "We believe in the right to protest inequality and support the players' movement to create a new platform for change. We also believe together, as Americans, we should honor our anthem. There is a way to do both." These situations, said Norm Johnston, global chief digital officer for Mindshare, are a reminder that for companies today "there is nowhere to hide." "In an age where everything can be politicized," he said, "it may be impossible for brands to not take a position on core values."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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LOS ANGELES AT T on Monday chose a Hollywood outsider, Ann Sarnoff, to run its recently acquired Warner Bros. movie and television studio, which will play a major role in the conglomerate's coming streaming service. Ms. Sarnoff, a New Yorker whose career has included leadership roles at Nickelodeon, the Women's National Basketball Association, Dow Jones and BBC America, will take over as chief executive at Warner Bros. later this summer. Ms. Sarnoff has no film experience, which AT T may see as an asset: She will not be beholden to entrenched Hollywood practices at a time when the entertainment business is rapidly moving online. Her new boss, John Stankey, the chief executive of AT T's WarnerMedia division, said in a statement that Ms. Sarnoff brought a "proven track record of innovation, creativity and business results." In a phone interview, Ms. Sarnoff emphasized her ability to innovate and develop growth strategies. "It's figuring out the potential of brands and properties and super serving customers," she said. "It's looking at more marketing routes." Ms. Sarnoff acknowledged that she has some learning to do before she becomes a major Hollywood executive. "I literally need to step on the lot," she said. "It's such an iconic studio with such a strong management team. I want to hear from the team and jointly develop strategies." Ms. Sarnoff, 57, succeeds Kevin Tsujihara, who was ousted in March after The Hollywood Reporter uncovered an apparent effort by Mr. Tsujihara to have a woman with whom he had an extramarital sexual relationship cast in Warner productions. He denied any corporate wrongdoing. Many senior executives at Warner Bros. had mixed feelings about Mr. Tsujihara's ouster. Over his six year tenure, Mr. Tsujihara had fostered a deep loyalty. "The loss of our C.E.O. was a painful experience," Peter Roth, who oversees Warner Bros. Television, said at a conference on the Warner lot this month. "But it was critical to calm the waters." 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. Ms. Sarnoff, the first woman to lead Warner Bros., has most recently been the president of BBC Studios Americas, where she has worked on a streaming service, BritBox, and led efforts to expand BBC franchises like "Doctor Who" and "Top Gear." Before joining the BBC in 2010, Ms. Sarnoff was president of Dow Jones Ventures, where she expanded a conference business tied to The Wall Street Journal. Ms. Sarnoff came to Dow Jones from the Women's National Basketball Association, where she served as chief operating officer. Earlier in her career, Ms. Sarnoff worked in children's television, helping to build a consumer products business for Nickelodeon. (Fun fact: Her husband's granduncle was David Sarnoff, the pioneering radio executive who created NBC in the 1920s.) Founded by four brothers in 1923, Warner Bros. is one of Hollywood's most storied studios. "Casablanca" and "Gone With the Wind" are among the classics in its library. The company is home to characters like Wonder Woman, Harry Potter, Batman, Bugs Bunny and Scooby Doo. Warner Bros. makes 70 television shows, which range from the cerebral ("Westworld") to the frivolous ("The Bachelor"). Warner Bros., which also includes substantial video game and consumer products units, had operating income of 547 million in the most recent quarter, a 43 percent increase from a year earlier, because of the box office success of "Aquaman" and growth in profit related to television show production. The studio is the smallest of the businesses that make up WarnerMedia, which also includes HBO and the Turner cable networks, including CNN. But the studio's ability to produce high quality content figures prominently in AT T's plan to introduce a Netflix style streaming service early next year. Like most Hollywood studios, Warner Bros. is trying to adapt to an entertainment business that has been upended by streaming on the television side and the rise of the Walt Disney Company as a colossus on the film front. Network sitcoms like "Friends" and "The Big Bang Theory" have long been profit machines for Warner Bros. Television, but the big broadcasters NBC, CBS, ABC have suffered extreme audience erosion and are leaning more heavily on their own studios for content. At the same time, Warner's dominance at the box office has dissipated. It was No. 1 at the North American box office from 2008 to 2010, but the leader for the last four years has been Disney, which owns the Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox movie factories.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Earlier this month, Meharry Medical College, a 143 year old historically black institution in Tennessee, proudly announced that it had received the second largest grant in its history 7.5 million to start a center to study public health issues that affect African Americans. But the gift has prompted a vehement backlash from African American health experts and activists because of the source of the funds: Juul Labs, the fast growing e cigarette company, now partially owned by the tobacco giant Altria. Black people in the United States have a higher death rate from tobacco related illnesses than other racial and ethnic groups. Research into the health effects of tobacco products, including newer nicotine delivery systems like Juul's popular vaping devices, was to be the first order of study for the new center. The announcement set off several days of frantic phone calls and meetings among black public health leaders, who remember the tobacco industry's history of targeting black communities with menthol cigarettes and who don't want black youths becoming addicted to nicotine through vaping. "Juul doesn't have African Americans' best interests in mind," said LaTroya Hester, a spokeswoman for the National African American Tobacco Prevention Network, which is sending a letter of protest to Meharry. "The truth is that Juul is a tobacco product, not much unlike its demon predecessors." Over the past year, Juul has hired numerous leaders with close ties to the black community as consultants and lobbyists. Among them are Benjamin Jealous, the former head of the N.A.A.C.P.; Heather Foster, a former adviser to President Obama who served as his liaison to civil rights leadership; and Chaka Burgess, co managing partner of the Empire Consulting Group, who serves on the governing boards of the N.A.A.C.P. Foundation and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and its political action committee. Juul has contributed to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and to the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade group for African American community newspapers. But Meharry officials stressed that they approached Juul, not the other way around. The college's president, Dr. James E.K. Hildreth Sr., has said he was confident that the new center's work would be free of Juul's influence. "We have historically found ourselves occupying the last seat at the table when research is conducted on emerging public health issues that profoundly affect minority communities," Dr. Hildreth wrote in a letter to the Meharry community. "We have paid a heavy price for being shut out." The debate highlights an ongoing, and heated, quandary in scientific research: Is it possible to take so much corporate money and not become biased in the funder's favor? Lindsay Andrews, a spokeswoman for Juul, said the company had no specific conditions for the grant, which will be paid over five years. "There are many questions about the overall public health impact of vapor products, and Juul products in particular, that a robust body of public health research must help answer," Ms. Andrews said. Meharry, founded in Nashville in 1876, is the nation's largest medical research center at a historically black institution. Dr. Hildreth, a Rhodes scholar with a Ph.D. from Oxford and an M.D. from Johns Hopkins, became president of the university in 2015 and is determined to expand its research. To do so, he has been in discussion with technology companies, foundations and the federal government, in addition to Juul. Last summer, Dr. Hildreth and Patrick Johnson, Meharry's senior vice president for institutional advancement, met with Juul representatives in Washington to ask the company to help underwrite a research program which would study, among other things, e cigarettes. They were close to an agreement when Juul executives told them they were in talks with Altria to pay Juul nearly 13 billion for a 35 percent stake, a transaction that would give the e cigarette maker access to Altria's shelf space in stores and buttress its lobbying muscle. Meharry, like many medical schools, has had a policy of turning down tobacco company donations. The disclosure led to considerable soul searching among the administrators. "We have an anti tobacco stance, and one of the things that caused pause for everyone involved was Altria," Mr. Johnson said. "The whole thing had to be re examined with more detail." via the collection of Stanford Research Into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising After months of discussion, Mr. Johnson said, Meharry agreed to accept the money. "Altria is an investor in this device company," he said. "They don't have a voice or say so. To this date, as we stand here, Juul does not sell tobacco products. As long as that remains, we are comfortable with the decision that we came to." Dr. Hildreth said the new program, to be called the Meharry Center for the Study of Social Determinants of Health, will conduct research into health conditions and issues related to tobacco and nicotine delivery products, including e cigarettes. The center will later study the impact of alcohol use and food instability on underserved communities, among other issues. Juul will not suggest studies, Mr. Johnson said, nor have any input before publication. The center will also convene annual meetings on tobacco and nicotine delivery products, and develop public education campaigns. But many public health groups said independence from Juul will be impossible. "That's a fantasy," said Sharon Y. Eubanks, who was lead counsel for the United States in the landmark lawsuit in which the tobacco industry was found in 2006 to have conspired for decades to hide the dangers of smoking. Ms. Eubanks, who is an advisory board member of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, is particularly troubled by the industry's record of promoting menthol cigarettes in black neighborhoods. These brands are especially addictive because the menthol flavor masks the cigarette's harshness. Altria's best selling Marlboro cigarette brand comes in menthol and regular tobacco flavors, as do Benson Hedges and other cigarettes. Juul has refused to stop selling menthol flavor pods in stores, though it has agreed to discontinue selling most of its other flavors, except online. According to the N.A.A.C.P.'s Youth Against Menthol campaign, about 85 percent of African American smokers aged 12 and older smoke menthol cigarettes, compared with 29 percent of white smokers. "Juul is cozying up to the black community, and that makes it harder for some parts of the black community to call them out on their targeting of African Americans," Ms. Eubanks said. "What do you do with money from a source that is in some way contaminated?" he said. "Tobacco has a specific history of hiring scientists to confuse the overall picture so that policies that might be restrictive would not go forward." But, he added, there are questions about Juul that need answers and for which independent funding might be very difficult to get. "If they do it right, in terms of studying who and how people become addicted, you could make a judgment that it is worth taking the money," he said. In a newspaper editorial last week, Dr. Hildreth said his eyes were wide open. The tobacco industry, he said, "has taken our money and delivered sickness and death in return. We at Meharry intend to advance the fight for better health and longer life by turning that insidious relationship on its head."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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In "Solitudes solo," the Montreal choreographer Daniel Leveille highlights five performers Mathieu Campeau, Esther Gaudette, Justin Gionet, Jason Martin and Emmanuel Proulx who offer kinetic explorations, both subtle and athletic, of what it means to be alone. This grouping of spare, elegant dances, performed in silence and to Bach, also introduces a new performance series at Abrons Arts Center: Travelogues, organized by Laurie Uprichard, formerly the director of Danspace Project and the Dublin Dance Festival. During Ms. Uprichard's tenure at Danspace Project, Mr. Leveille's unadorned choreography was regularly on display; his 2012 production, which features Marc Parent's austere lighting, is a chance to revisit Mr. Leveille's unaffected choreographic voice. The series will continue in May with a shared program by Kimberly Bartosik and Dylan Crossman, as well as in October with separate engagements by the Irish company ponydance and the Los Angeles choreographer Lionel Popkin. (Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m., Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, at Pitt Street, Lower East Side; 212 352 3101, abronsartscenter.org).
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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BERKELEY, CALIF. Like thick rim glasses, Doc Martens and so many other things that fell out of favor only to spring back to popularity years later, fuel cell cars have resurfaced. In Tokyo on Wednesday, Toyota was the first automaker in the new season of international auto shows to reveal its fresh take on this headline grabbing technology, quickly followed by Honda and Hyundai in Los Angeles. All three automakers unveiled new design studies intended to signal that fuel cell vehicles, which produce zero tailpipe pollutants, are ever so close to production. Each concept vehicle demonstrated progress in the efficiency and packaging of their fuel cell systems, which generate electricity onboard by combining hydrogen and oxygen and emit only water vapor. What these automakers failed to deliver in terms of specifics they offset with lofty promises of a real and rapidly approaching hydrogen based future. Before you file this news with reports of the imminent arrival of flying cars, consider this: For the last four months, I have been living with fuel cell technology, logging more than 2,500 miles at the wheel of a Toyota Highlander FCHV adv test bed. And I took two short test drives of a sedan that the company said would be ready for volume production in about 24 months. The all electric Toyota technowonder that visited my driveway was based on a 2008 Highlander midsize crossover. It offered nearly 300 miles of driving range and five minute fill ups a combination that no battery electric car offers. I drove for days without tailpipe emissions and without depleting the tank. Multiple round trip journeys from my East Bay home to San Jose or Sacramento were no problem. Those trips are a challenge for the Nissan Leaf E.V. that I usually drive, which offers 80 miles of real world range and charging times measured in hours. "Toyota made a decision the fuel cell car is going to be a big part of our future," John Hanson, a Toyota spokesman, said. "That's the direction we're going, big time." Toyota is not alone. Four other carmakers General Motors, Hyundai, Honda and Mercedes Benz are also promising fuel cell cars in the next few years. They must satisfy California's zero emission laws, essentially requiring that by 2025 about 15 percent of new cars refuel by plugging into the grid or filling up with hydrogen. My first visits to the station, on the block where Pixar makes movies, were a scene you'd expect from one of the studio's hapless characters. Even after training, my first tries ended with the heavy connector being ejected and falling to the pavement. That was user error; soon enough, I figured out the problem, and topping up with hydrogen gas became routine. A kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of hydrogen contains nearly the same amount of energy as a gallon of gasoline. To top up, I added about 4 to 5 kilograms of gaseous hydrogen into tanks at a pressure of 10,000 pounds per square inch. The Highlander traveled about 55 miles on a kilogram. In Emeryville, I paid 12 to 13 a kilogram. Measured against a baseline of a 2008 Highlander Hybrid, which carried an E.P.A. rating of 27 m.p.g. in the city and 25 on the highway, that's roughly equivalent to paying 6 for a gallon of gasoline. According to Toyota, full scale production of hydrogen is projected to drop the cost below the current price of gasoline, but for now E.V.'s that charge from the grid and store the energy in a lithium ion battery pack operate at a cost per mile expense that's commonly one third that of filling up a fuel cell vehicle with hydrogen. Some aspects of the 2008 fuel cell Highlander are by now outdated, so Toyota gave me two turns, once in May and again in September, in a test vehicle that it says is more representative of the sedan it will offer in 2015. This mule, which had its fuel cell powertrain installed in the body of a Lexus HS 250h a hybrid model that has been discontinued used zip ties and gaffer's tape to hold together prototype parts and diagnostic equipment. But it gave a sportier drive than the Highlander. The production car will carry a Toyota badge. All electric cars, whether drawing their energy from batteries or fuel cells, offer impressive low speed response and near silent operation. An unexpected exception in a fuel cell car is the hiss of an air compressor, which pumps oxygen from the atmosphere to the fuel cell. The main challenge facing Toyota engineers, however, is the vehicle's price. "The effort to bring this car to market is about lowering the cost, while providing satisfactory performance," said Matt McClory, principal engineer of fuel cell vehicle development for Toyota in the United States, as we did a test drive around Torrance, Calif. "Bringing the costs down was the biggest bogey." Toyota executives say they believe a target price around 50,000 is needed to make the cars attractive. That might require the company to price the cars below cost until production reaches a profitable level. As part of the effort to reduce costs in the 2015 car, Toyota engineers are using a motor and power electronics borrowed from the company's hybrids. The cost of the fuel cell unit, known as the stack, was cut by reducing the amount of platinum catalyst it needed and it was made smaller to fit it under the front seats. The number of tanks was reduced to two in the coming sedan model, from four in the converted Highlander. The drives in the sedan mule did not alter my view of Toyota's reputation for emphasizing familiarity over driving excitement. It raised the question of whether such a sedate vehicle, limited to sparse and expensive fueling options, would justify its hefty price. Marketing will be tricky; it may be necessary to address the safety concerns of consumers. The hydrogen is stored in very durable tanks, and in the extremely unlikely event of a puncture, the gas quickly dissipates into the air, as opposed to liquid fuel that can pool on roadways. By the time Toyota sells its first fuel cell sedan, there will be about a half million plug in vehicles on the road in the United States and tens of thousands of E.V. charging stations. At the same time, it's uncertain how many hydrogen stations will be online in California by the end of 2015, even with a new source of infrastructure financing. In September, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 8. It includes 20 million a year for up to 10 years, with the goal of building about 100 new stations over the coming decade. The economics are questionable. Each station costs from 1 million to 3 million, depending on whether hydrogen is produced on the site. The hydrogen used in transportation mostly comes from steam reformation of natural gas. Outside Southern California, which has underground pipes, hydrogen is trucked in liquid form to stations.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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When Pandemic hit the market, cooperative games were few and far between. As they've grown in popularity, I've wondered why it's taken so long for them to catch on. I've also wondered why until recently we've considered games and competition to be synonymous. Given the conditions we now find ourselves in, it's no surprise that a game named Pandemic is popular. I've seen social media posts where people worry that playing it, or watching a disaster movie like "Contagion," is morbid and perhaps socially unacceptable. To me, such activity is a natural way to cope with our new reality. It gives people a chance to confront their fears, make sense of the situation and perhaps even feel somewhat in control as they defiantly attempt to defeat the big bad themselves. But I can't shake the ugly feeling that comes with knowing the game tends to do better when it resembles current events, when real people are suffering. My hope is that Pandemic can provide a model for us in this time of crisis. We don't all have to be globe trotting heroes to do our part. We each have special skills and should use them to make the city and statewide lockdowns safer and easier to bear. We need to communicate effectively, reach out to our friends and loved ones as well as ensure that whatever we share on social media is based on facts. We need to cooperate, look after our older neighbors and find ways to work from home wherever possible. And we need to coordinate and share ideas for keeping the kids entertained, for helping others obtain hard to get supplies and for supporting health care workers on the front lines. It's going to take serious collective action and sacrifice to slow the spread of the virus. It's heartening to see organizations, individuals and some government leaders step up. Yet it's clear that, not unlike that disastrous game I played early in my marriage with Donna, we're not all working together. Hoarding and price gouging have no place in a crisis. Nor do the us against them strategies used by some of our leaders, blaming other countries and political parties, or mischaracterizing the dangers of the disease. Board games have comparatively low stakes, but I've learned they have much to teach us: We all need to play to our strengths, balance short term threats against long term goals and make sacrifices for the common good. If we can communicate, coordinate and cooperate effectively we might better overcome this uncaring, relentless and frightening opponent.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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The town of Great Barrington, nestled in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, has long been a popular weekend destination because of its picturesque setting and proximity to many cultural attractions like the Tanglewood summer music festival. But the area also has a vibrant year round community of residents, some of them former New Yorkers who have opened a mix of eclectic stores selling everything from housewares to high fashion. Most of the shopping is concentrated on Main Street with a few spots tucked away nearby. A former Los Angeles boutique owner and stylist, Hillary Rush took over her father's two decade old clothing store three years ago and refined its women's and men's wear to reflect her fashion sense. She stocks the 2,000 square foot, wood paneled space with brands like Eileen Fisher and the more cutting edge Nili Lotan and Vince. She also carries under the radar brands like 360 Sweater and Gant Rugger. Prices from 20. A live music space and restaurant serving classic American fare, this family venture also has a small bakery where the owner's 29 year old daughter, Kaitlin Stafford, sells her line of 30 popular oversize cookies. Her renditions include a banana chocolate walnut sandwich with Kahlua buttercream and a mint infused sugar version with a cucumber cream. Customers can pick up a wrapped cookie or eat it in the black walled space which, with its beaded curtains and multicolored string lighting, has a hippie ish vibe. Prices from 2.49.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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LAKE OF THE OZARKS My Surreal Summers in a Vanishing America By Bill Geist As a journalist, Bill Geist has traveled the same cornball, goofy and sometimes unimaginably wistful back roads of America as long as I have: for over 40 years. Writers are often not generous, especially to people who cover the same turf, but I'm stepping aside, flourishing my hat in a princely bow and declaring Bill Geist the reigning Zeit Geist of the baby boomer generation. In his charming new book, he has perfectly captured what middle class life was like in the midcentury American Midwest. "Lake of the Ozarks" is a personal memoir. Geist hasn't overreached and tried to define a whole generation from the East Coast to the West. Instead, he has cut himself a small slice of the American culture that he was part of, offering it up for the rest of us to enjoy and remember. "Write what you know" is advice often given to aspiring writers; it has served Geist perfectly. This is a memoir that could have slithered off the road with colorful characters flattened to "Hee Haw" hillbilly stereotypes. Geist avoids that, while also nimbly sidestepping the kind of groan inducing lecture given to teenagers by people his age: "I had to walk 10 miles to school barefoot in the snow, and after I walked home I had to milk 100 angry cows before facing a dinner of beanie weenie casserole." The span of the book takes place as Geist grows from a gawky redheaded teenager to a slightly less gawky sunburned older teenager, all during the summers he spent working at his uncle's hotel, , at, as the tourist billboards have it, "Beautiful Lake of the Ozarks." Uncle Ed, a small town Donald Trump, is painted larger than life. He drives big new Cadillacs, smokes huge cigars and runs his hotel kingdom with the precision of General Patton. If you're looking for a book with crazy plot twists and a supersonic narrative arc, this one may not be for you. It's a slow meditation on a time gone by. Like a photograph whose Kodachrome has started to turn sepia, it may not be modern or high tech but it's a meaningful and accurate rendering of times past.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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It's all too easy for a flamenco dance troupe that believes in tradition but wishes to explore new directions to go astray. There was a moment in "Por los Caminos," a program presented at the Theater at the 14th Street Y over the weekend, when the Sonia Olla Flamenco Dance Company, performing in front of projected images of paths through dark woods, seemed on the verge of getting lost. But this troupe knows its way home. The program's theme of blended cultures was most clearly evident in the participation of the Pakistani born vocalist Arooj Aftab. Sweet and nimble of voice, Ms. Aftab sang one of her own lulling compositions in a style she calls neo Sufi, accompanied by one of the troupe's fine guitarists, Angel Ruiz. At another point, she joined the company's vocalist, Ismael Fernandez, in a duet, their two styles and melodies overlapping in friendly counterpoint. These were welcome digressions, but the show took a wrong turn with "El Encuentro." As the live singing and guitar playing were overwhelmed by a tacky recording of electric guitar and synthesizers, Ms. Olla and the dancer Nino de los Reyes were enveloped in stage fog for a limply melodramatic duet. Whatever culture flamenco was blending with here was beneath it. Fortunately, the remainder of the program took a more tried and true route. In his solos, Mr. de los Reyes, bald and bearded, often appeared to be adopting technical ideas from tap dancing, but he skillfully incorporated these borrowings into a passionate flamenco style. Some force seemed to be pressing through him and periodically erupting, throwing him off balance in long and beautifully circuitous phrases.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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The topics parents are talking about. Evidence based guidance. Personal stories that matter. Sign up now to get NYT Parenting in your inbox every week. When my daughter's pediatrician in New York City weighs her, we have to take all of her clothes and diaper off and step away from the scale so it can be recalibrated. Then we put her on the scale, our hands hovering over her in case she picks that moment to become an expert roller. Her weight, down to exact ounces, flashes in red on the screen and gets recorded in the computer. We recently came to Mumbai for a few months and at our daughter's five month introductory well visit here, the pediatrician placed her down, fully clothed, on his scale, looked at the weight, picked her back up and handed her to me. Two minutes later, he said, "Oh dear, I don't remember what the scale said, do you?" "No," I panicked. "Six kilos and either .68 or .78 but I don't remember exactly. Should we do it again? And shouldn't we remove her clothes and diaper?" He brushed me off and simply said, "Yes, I also thought it was over 6, so she's a good weight." For the next few minutes, I wasn't really listening to what he was telling us about introducing solids. My mind was on her weight how would I know exactly how much she had gained, whether everything was on track, what percentile she was now in, and how I was succeeding as a parent. I had my daughter while we were living in Brooklyn, the competitive parenting capital of the world. Parenting is hard enough without having one woman in a mothers' group suggest importing organic formula from Norway while another, baby clutched at her breast, gasps that we could even consider feeding our babies formula. When buying my baby's first bassinet before she was born, I made the mistake of asking my online mothers' group for recommendations. I got flooded with responses and links and Amazon reviews and my post quickly devolved into a fight between the co sleepers and non co sleepers. I finally settled on an expensive bassinet (because when you get anxious about child rearing, you can be tricked into assuming that more expensive means better) and then, once it arrived, spent days worried that I had made the wrong decision. The bassinet we got worked perfectly well but just as we were starting to get full nights of sleep and an occasional night out, we got on a plane and flew across the world to India and landed at the airport at 1 a.m. It was bustling with families waiting for loved ones and babies and children of all ages running around excitedly with no concept of a bedtime. From the minute we arrived in India, I had to let go. I had to stop worrying because I couldn't worry anymore it is impossible to worry about everything I might need to worry about in India: contaminated water, mosquitoes that may carry dengue or malaria, traffic that often follows no rules. Against all of that, did it really matter if my daughter had gained three ounces or five? The next day, in Mumbai, I went to a fancy baby shop to buy cribs, ready to spend a few hours weighing the pros and cons of various options. With the baby strapped to me in a carrier and an iced coffee in my hand, I marched in to the shop and said, "I'd like to see your options for cribs, please." "This one," the salesperson said. I ordered it and left the shop within 10 minutes. I myself was born in India and had a perfectly safe and sound upbringing here but, in the eternal battle of nature versus nurture, my surroundings in Brooklyn seemed to be affecting me more than my own childhood or my mother's suggestions that I calm down. Her advice was impossible for me to hear in my New York environment, surrounded by my fellow mothers whose days are ruled by feeding apps. When I showed my Indian grandmother the feeding app on my phone, instead of marveling at it and saying she wished she'd had such a thing when she was a young mother, she just laughed at me and took a long sip of her coconut water. I had been nervous about making this big trip with our newborn daughter because to leave our little neighborhood of Brooklyn and travel across the world and set up a different life felt too daunting. Babies are challenging: In a cruel failure of evolution, adults require five hours of uninterrupted sleep in order to function and newborn babies need to feed every three hours. They say babies thrive on routine and I had just begun to find mine in Brooklyn, but it was a perfectly crafted rhythm with no space for deviation or change. I have the luxury of working from home so I was feeding her as soon as the baby feeding app beeped and I put her down for naps at exactly the same time every day. My baby, who loved 22 out of the 24 hours it took us to get to Mumbai, doesn't seem to be too bothered about her routine being disrupted so far. She loves all the people in India and reaches for them faster than I can swoop in and force them to cover themselves with antibacterial gel. She's had a stomach upset already but didn't seem nearly as troubled by it as I was. We went out to dinner with friends who have a 7 month old and both babies stayed awake for part of the dinner and then fell asleep in their strollers. When we got home we transferred her to her crib and she kept sleeping peacefully.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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Fans complained that they get wet when it rains, but architectural historians praise Pier Luigi Nervi's stadium as a masterpiece. ROME The pages of the Italian passport offer a crash course of sorts on high points in the country's architecture. After the Pantheon in Rome and the Ducal Palace in Venice, page 31 shows a more modern structure: the cantilevered grandstand canopy of Florence's main sports stadium, designed 90 years ago by the Italian architect Pier Luigi Nervi. Immediately acclaimed for its avant garde design, the reinforced concrete Artemio Franchi stadium is known to contemporary architects and engineers through countless textbooks on 20th century architecture. So, when the new American owner of A.C.F. Fiorentina, the stadium's resident soccer team, announced this year that he wanted to tear the stadium down to build a more comfortable and modern venue for the club's fans, architects and heritage associations went on the warpath. Last May, a committee of experts unanimously certified the building's cultural and historical significance, bringing it under Italy's strict conservation laws. But in September, the Italian government passed a decree designed primarily to streamline procedures for public works. The law included an article allowing sporting facilities, regardless of their historical importance, to bypass conservation requirements to make modifications including reconstruction that would improve a structure's efficiency and bring it up to "international standards of security, health and public safety." Culture Ministry officials must identify specific elements of the sporting facility worthy of preservation: These can then be removed and conserved elsewhere, or reproduced, even in a different scale, the new law says. "As absurd as it seems, the very people who were once tasked with protecting a monument are now called on to decide what to destroy," said Elisabetta Margiotta Nervi, secretary general of the Pier Luigi Nervi Project Association, which was founded by the architect's heirs to safeguard his heritage. Italy takes the protection of its cultural heritage so seriously that it is enshrined in the Constitution. So conservators were immediately concerned when legislators approved measures chipping away at principles that seemed untouchable. Many fear that the law pushed through last September could be the first step toward dismantling Italy's strict and widely praised conservation laws. A.C.F. Fiorentina was bought in 2019 by Rocco B. Commisso, the billionaire chairman of the cable provider Mediacom. At the time, Mr. Commisso said that he was looking at what could be done about the team's stadium, which undeniably lacks many of the bells and whistles of the arenas that are home to teams in Europe's other top leagues. Among criticisms of the design is that the seats on its curved sides are too far from the playing field; that it is only partly covered, so fans get wet when it rains; and that the retrofitted seats (it was designed as a standing room stadium) are uncomfortable. Most contemporary sports grounds include commercial areas with stores, gyms, restaurants, even museums that help teams defray their costs but there are none of these in the 1930s Artemio Franchi stadium. The building is owned by Florence city hall, which shares some maintenance costs with A.C.F. Fiorentina. A spokesman for the city, who asked not to be identified, as is common in Italian institutions, said that structural studies carried out with the University of Florence suggested that the stadium was showing signs of wear, "which is normal for a nearly 100 year old building," and that the building also required significant work to improve its security in the event of an earthquake. The city's main interest, the spokesman said, was that fans could continue to see games in safety. Mr. Commisso declined to be interviewed and, through a spokesman, the club declined to comment. But last month, Mr. Commisso gave an interview to Radio Viola, a regular sports program about A.C.F. Fiorentina, in which he said that a new stadium was necessary for the franchise to flourish. "Unless revenues increase by a lot, Fiorentina won't be able to compete" against clubs with bigger budgets, Mr. Commisso said. Citing a study commissioned by the team, Mr. Commisso said that a new stadium would transform the club's finances. Mario Tenerani, editor in chief of Brivido Sportivo, Florence's main sports newspaper, said that many of the team's fans, "even if they are from Florence, don't care about the old stadium" and would be happy to have a new one in its place. "They're with Rocco," he said. Alternative solutions that had been proposed, including building a new stadium in another part of the city, have fallen through. "The best solution would be a compromise, but he doesn't want a compromise," Mr. Tenerani added. "He wants to build a stadium that lives up to his expectations." Two weeks ago, Mr. Commisso's team set the ball in motion, writing to the Culture Ministry to formally ask officials in Rome to verify whether there were elements of the stadium that would have to be preserved. The Franchi's most distinctive elements are its helical staircases, cantilevered canopy and a tall slender tower known as the Marathon tower that overlooks the sports field but heritage advocates say the entire stadium is a masterpiece that must be preserved in its entirety. "As a piece of stadium design it was tremendously influential you can point to dozens, if not hundreds of stadiums all over the world that were done in the early and mid 20th century that adopted a lot of same things that Nervi was exploring there," said Thomas Leslie, a professor of architecture at Iowa State University, and one of the main promoters of the petition to save the stadium. The ministry's response is expected within 10 weeks. Andrea Pessina, the Culture Ministry's top conservation official in Florence and one of the experts to declare the stadium a national landmark in May, said in a telephone interview that his office would have been open to allowing changes to stadium, because of its age and changing standards. Even covering the grandstands and adding commercial spaces seemed possible, he said. "But not demolishing," he added. That decision, however, is out of his hands. Under the new law, another official, in Rome, will make the call. Conservators who want to save the stadium say that modern construction methods and top tier architects would be able to restyle the building, bringing it up to code, while leaving it intact, pointing to other modern examples like Renzo Piano's work on the Morgan Library in New York, or Mario Botta's revamp of La Scala opera house in Milan. Such a restyling can be "a difficult challenge but one that the city of Florence, the cradle of Italian culture, can't refuse," said Marco Magnifico, executive vice president of the Fondo Ambiente Italiano, a heritage organization. And Mr. Pessina, the culture official, was especially pessimistic that the relaxation of the country's strict conservation laws could be extended to other kinds of structures, like its historic train stations or public buildings. "It's a crack that opens in a dam," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Endurance amid adversity is one of the themes of "Wild Grass," a collection of prose poems by Lu Xun, a poet, novelist, essayist and social activist who died in 1936 and is considered one of the major figures of 20th century Chinese literature. That book inspired Wang Yuanyuan to create a choreographic "Wild Grass," to music by Su Cong, which Beijing Dance Theater is presenting in its American premiere as part of this year's Next Wave Festival. Just as Lu combined classical Chinese and contemporary literary forms in his writings, so Ms. Wang blends traditional Chinese dance with ballet and modern dance in images of dancers enduring in bleak landscapes as they wander through fallen leaves, treat one another as puppets and drag one another across the stage. Despite their hardships, they never lose the will to survive.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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In a rare legal broadside by a politician against a major news organization, Lt. Gov. Justin E. Fairfax of Virginia sued CBS on Thursday for defamation, saying the network's news division smeared him by airing interviews with two women who accused the lawmaker of sexual assault. Mr. Fairfax, who remained in his job despite an outcry after the assault accusations, asked CBS to pay him 400 million in damages. He said the network ignored evidence that the women's accounts were untruthful, and he argues that the reports damaged his career and reputation. CBS News, in a statement, said: "We stand by our reporting and we will vigorously defend this lawsuit." The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., concerns a pair of interviews that aired in April on "CBS This Morning," conducted by the anchor Gayle King. One woman, Meredith Watson, accused Mr. Fairfax of raping her in 2000 in a fraternity house at Duke University, where they were students. Another woman, Vanessa C. Tyson, a professor of political science, described being sexually assaulted by Mr. Fairfax after they met at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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PARIS It was sheer coincidence that Rick Owens, an American in Paris, staged his "Mastodon" show, named for an extinct species, the same night as the Republican debate in Detroit, where Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were characterized by this newspaper as "fighting for their political lives." It was a fluke of timing that Mr. Owens subtitled the show after a Salvador Dali painting ("Swans Reflecting Elephants") at a moment when most observers, including those at the side of the runway, feel they are living through a surreal time. And it was just happenstance that he was looking at embracing "the inevitable end of a cycle" just as issues of the decline of the republic were on everyone's minds. Really: This isn't sarcasm. It wasn't planned that way. Mr. Owens had been, he said, thinking not about politics but about the destruction of the environment, a concern since his men's show earlier in the year, and this was a kinder, gentler continuation of that train of design. But just because it started in one place does not negate its eerie resonance in another. Some things just happen that way. It was impossible to see the gracefully draped cream tunics, cowls creating their own topography, the elephantine trousers, mudslide leather boleros and boiling sea foam capes, however, and not feel a potent nostalgia for a world gone by: Natural or political just depends on your point of view. Either way, the clothes touched a nerve. Though it was taking place in a new venue, the better to suggest a fresh start, and though the show notes used words like "love" and "liberty" and "euphoria" to describe the peplum silk tops with puffed sleeves, the metallic high necked lace dresses and gold trench designed by the "creative studio," the collection resembled nothing so much as an amalgam of various looks we have seen before on other runways. The man/woman thing it was in there. The big shouldered '80s "Dynasty" thing in there. The lingerie Madonna moment in there. There was little about the result that appeared either unique or deeply considered, two qualities that had always been associated with Lanvin (at least in its modern incarnation). Maybe that's inevitable, when a company is without creative leadership, but it only serves to underscore the absence of a guiding aesthetic mind. Which raises the question: When in between eras, why force the issue? At least at Christian Dior, the other brand currently with an artistic director opening, there was more fluency with pre existing elements, though its update in the hands of the studio heads Lucie Meier and Serge Ruffieux, the creative caretakers of the brand, was less than focused. Short, curvy portrait collared cashmere or fur coats had a jolie madame cool, and cocktail dresses with hip hugging skirts and high waists under colorful silks sliding off one shoulder, a fillip of chic. But the new Bar suit, the jacket purposefully oversize and sporting some extra frou on one hip, the skirt below the knee with an inexplicable fold on a thigh, were frumpy. Neither had the clarity of Loewe, where in his best show yet as creative director Jonathan Anderson climbed out of the leather goods rabbit hole and left his own uninhibited, experimental instincts at home (though they often plant new ideas in fashion's head, they can tilt to the unwearable extreme: Remember the clear plastic pants of last season?). The result was a new voice for the brand. It had to do with a fluid hourglass silhouette constructed from long sleeved, handkerchief hemmed, organic bamboo jersey dresses; or cotton shirting caught at the waist by a leather breastplate or a shirred nylon overlay, echoed at the elbow; and a Klimtian palette of cream, black and gold. And it had to do with elongated tweed knits lavishly fringed on the bias and hem, complete with matching bags (plus cat faced nappa medallions hung around the neck) and evening wear dangling "sleeves" of looped metallic chains. These were clothes that knew what they were about an easy, intelligent elegance. As does Vetements, the in your face upstart "collective" whose iconoclastic, all inclusive approach to sartorial sacred cows, gender fluidity and street style has propelled its co founder, Demna Gvasalia, to the hot seat at Balenciaga (he makes his debut on Sunday). In the state flag festooned environs of the American Cathedral in Paris, parochial school pleated skirts and dresses were shrunken to infant proportions and then squeezed onto grown women; neckties roped and left to trail, noose like, at the back; shoulders on shirts and jackets blown out to Frankenstein size or pinched up and in, to create a Quasimodo effect; and sweatshirts and sweatgowns emblazoned with slogans: "sexual fantasies" and "unskinny" and "May the bridge I burn light the way," among them. The latter being particularly apropos. They'll probably sell out, as will the thigh high leather wader boots tattooed with guns and roses and the jailhouse legends "love" and "hate" above each knee; ditto, the velvet trouser suits, sneaked in amid the mayhem.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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AUDI says the introduction of a new Allroad wagon for the American market, after an eight year absence, signifies the "return of the icon." When the original model was withdrawn from the United States after the 2005 model year, it seemed less like an icon than a sales disappointment some 26,000 were sold over four years, well below initial estimates. But Audi now considers the first Allroad "quite the success, for its day, for not being an S.U.V.," a company spokesman, Mark Dahncke, said last week. Audi wagons are quite popular in Europe, and the Allroad continued to sell well there even after it became an orphan over here. Surviving Allroads still have a devoted following in the United States, selling even now at five figure prices. The original car's 40,000 sticker price seemed steep in the early 2000s, and that is surely one reason it didn't sell better. The handsome new Allroad is still around 40,000 39,600 and a 875 delivery fee, to be exact. At a glance, given the inflation in German luxury cars of late, such a price seems more palatable than it did a decade ago. But unlike its predecessor, which came pretty well equipped in basic trim, the new Allroad's window sticker can easily zoom higher. The top line Prestige trim package adds 9,200 by itself, and Audi offers many, many more options.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Travis Roy, who suffered a paralyzing injury just 11 seconds into his first hockey game for Boston University in 1995 and, as a philanthropist and motivational speaker, was revered by the sports world as an example of determination and courage, died on Thursday in a hospital outside Burlington, Vt. He was 45. The cause was complications of surgery he needed after two and a half decades of being in a wheelchair, Keith VanOrden, his brother in law, said. In the opening seconds of a televised college hockey game on Oct. 20, 1995, Roy, a forward, skated in to body check an opposing defenseman, crashed into the boards and fell to the ice. "It was as if my head had become disengaged from my body," he recalled in a book, "Eleven Seconds: A Story of Tragedy, Courage Triumph," written with E.M. Swift. "I was turning the key in the ignition on a cold winter morning, and the battery was completely dead. Not a spark. Just click, and nothing. And right away it passed through my mind I was probably paralyzed." He had shattered his fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. The injury left Roy a quadriplegic. Eventually he regained some movement in his right arm, which he used to work the joystick on his wheelchair. College hockey is held in awe in Boston; its athletes are worshiped and its fallen participants mourned. Shortly after Roy's accident, more than 200 special church Masses and prayer services were held in his honor, according to his father, Lee. That reverence for Roy grew as he gave motivational speeches and raised money to help those with spinal injuries and to fund research. The Travis Roy Foundation, established in 1996 to support people with spinal cord injuries, has given nearly 5 million in research grants and helped more than 2,100 quadriplegics and paraplegics, according to its website. Travis Roy was born on April 17, 1975, in Yarmouth, Maine, to Brenda and Lee Roy. His father, who had been a standout hockey player at the University of Vermont, manages several sports arenas. By the mid 1990s, Travis Roy had become one of the country's top college hockey recruits. The Boston University team he joined was a powerhouse. It included four players who went on to long National Hockey League careers: Chris Drury, Mike Grier, Jay Pandolfo and Shawn Bates. Drury, a sophomore on the team, was on the ice when Roy crashed into the boards, in a game against North Dakota. "I was just 10 feet away when it happened," he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2006. "It was chilling." "That could have been me," he added. "And the way Travis had dealt with this tragedy is an inspiration to me." Now the assistant general manager for the New York Rangers, Drury went on to win a Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche and an Olympic silver medal with the United States Olympic Hockey team. He remained close with Roy. "Not a day goes by that I don't think of Travis Roy," he said. After Drury won the Cup with the Avalanche in 2001, he took it to Boston, where Roy lived. "It was the first time I had ever seen the Stanley Cup," Roy said at the time. "It was a thrill." Kevin Shattenkirk, an N.H.L. veteran now with the Anaheim Ducks, played three seasons for Boston University, where Roy was a source of inspiration. "Travis was someone that any B.U. hockey player knew not because of his accident but because of how present he was within the program," Shattenkirk said in a text message on Thursday. "I always admired how he never let anyone feel sorry for him. He inspired me and every person that ever met him, and the hockey world will remember him forever." In addition to his father, Roy is survived by his mother and a sister, Tobi VanOrden. Roy's determination was evident shortly after his accident. Keith VanOrden recalled "watching him graduate in four years without being able to pick up a highlighter or take notes in class." That, he said, "pales in comparison to what he did as a motivational speaker." "Sometimes in life you choose your challenges, other times the challenges choose you," Roy would say, according to VanOrden. "And it's what you do in the face of those challenges that defines who you are and what you'll become."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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As air travel has ticked up in the last month, airlines have divided into two camps: those blocking strategic seats to offer more space, and those willing to fill planes to capacity. In the latter camp, United Airlines never instituted limits and continues to sell all available seats as demand allows. As of July 1, American Airlines announced it would drop its capacity restraints, in place at 85 percent since April. In the other corner are Alaska Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Southwest Airlines who say they will continue to block middle or adjacent seats through Sept. 30. JetBlue Airways just extended its ban on selling middle seats through Labor Day. The rise of full flights this summer has enraged some travelers. In response to a recent New York Times story on the lack of social distancing in the air, one reader commented, "I recently flew on two different American Airlines flights. Passengers totally packed together as in the old days, zero social distancing, and frequently, the stewardess left her mask hanging off her face. NEVER again." The economic pressure to sell all seats is enormous. Last week, Delta announced that its revenue plunged 88 percent in the second quarter, losing 5.7 billion. Also last week, American said it could furlough 20,000 people beginning Oct. 1, when federal stimulus funds expire. United said it could shed 36,000 jobs in the fall. "Whatever airlines do to make people comfortable flying again is good for the entire industry," said Seth Kaplan, an airline expert and the host of the podcast Airlines Confidential. "United and American are probably glad Delta and Southwest are giving the public confidence in flying, but they're going to take the money." Among these four biggest airlines in the nation, he added, Delta and Southwest entered the pandemic in a stronger financial position than American and United. As of mid July, the average flight only carries about 60 people, flying at an average of about 50 percent capacity, according to the trade group Airlines for America, making it easier for the more generous airlines to guarantee open space. Rather than blocking seats, American and United are offering rebooking for travelers on crowded flights through pre flight notifications, though some fliers have complained that changing plans at the last minute is inconvenient. Joy Gonzalez of Seattle, a recent flier on American, said the options she'd been given to change involved long trips "with two or three layovers." "We have multiple layers of protection in place for those who fly with us, including required face coverings, enhanced cleaning procedures and a pre flight Covid 19 symptom checklist and we're providing additional flexibility for customers to change their travel plans, as well," wrote Ross Feinstein, an American spokesman, in an email. A United spokesman, Charles Hobart, wrote in an email that "the overwhelming majority of our flights continue to depart with multiple empty seats." Is it even possible to achieve social distancing in the air? On airlines that aren't blocking seats, carriers say they allow passengers, once boarded, to move to an empty seat within their ticketed cabin, even if that seat is a premium seat, assuming there isn't an issue with balance and weight distribution. But there have been some incidents on American planes in which passengers complained that they were not allowed to move to premium seats. "They made it very clear that if you are trying to sit in empty seats to socially distance, you are still not permitted to sit in exit row seats because you have to pay for them," commented John Schmidt, a Times reader, on July 8, about an American flight from Austin to Los Angeles. "This was a public announcement. Is definitely their policy," he wrote. On July 10, American said it sent a reminder to its flight attendants that read, "For now, it's OK for customers to move to different seats in the same cabin." Just hoping for an empty seat isn't enough for Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, who tweeted about his packed American Airlines plane from Dallas to Portland on July 2, concluding, "No way you aren't facilitating spread of COVID infections." The next day he wrote on Twitter that he would "introduce a bill to ban the sale of middle seats through this pandemic." "I recognize this does not fill the six foot standard established by the C.D.C.," he said in an interview. "But it's the minimum requirement to decrease substantially the immediate proximity of someone else's exhaled breath." Even if middle seats are left open, experts point out that you're still not going to get the desired six feet of safe distance from the passenger occupying the same row. Still, some medical experts say travel can be done safely. "Shorter is better, in terms of flights, so you don't have as much exposure to other people," said Preeti Malani, the chief health officer and a professor of medicine in the infectious diseases division at the University of Michigan. "I tend to feel window seats are better because you're around fewer people," she added. In its advice to travelers, the CDC states on its website, "Most viruses and other germs do not spread easily on flights because of how air circulates and is filtered on airplanes." Data on in flight coronavirus transmission is rare. The International Air Transport Association, a trade association representing the world's airlines, found four episodes of in flight Covid 19 transmission, all from passengers to crew members, between January and March 2020, in a survey of 18 major airlines. "The reasons for the apparently low rate of in flight transmission are not known, but could encompass a combination of the lack of face to face contact, and the physical barriers provided by seat backs, along with the characteristics of air flow," it wrote in a document on restarting aviation in the Covid 19 era. With or without social distance, wear a mask More important than social distancing, experts say, is wearing a mask. "A lot of people are asymptomatic with this, which is why we really want everyone wearing masks," said Dr. Trish Perl, the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in a recent news conference on behalf of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. She noted that masks reduce the risk of catching the virus by up to 70 percent. Most airlines in the United States require masks except when a passenger is eating or drinking, which has sparked some dissent in the air. In June, CNN reported that one passenger had been removed from an American flight for not wearing a mask and banned from future flights while the mask mandate is in place. Delta has begun asking travelers who can't wear a mask for health reasons to reconsider flying; if they do decide to travel, they will be subjected to a private health screening at the airport to determine whether they will be allowed to fly. Other airlines, including Alaska and Allegiant, require passengers to acknowledge the mask policy at check in via a health agreement or questionnaire. Alaska will issue a yellow card to passengers who repeatedly refuse to wear a mask. The card, modeled on soccer fouls, states, "This is your final notice to comply with our policy. Next, we will file a report, which could result in the suspension of future travel on Alaska Airlines." "It's been a patchwork since there is no federal mandate on masks," said Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants union, which is calling on government leadership to normalize face coverings in flight the same way the Federal Aviation Administration mandates seat belts for safety. "Once that's communicated, people are used to following the rules, especially in aviation," she added. "You have to recognize, this is not a normal day. When you're flying, your fate is tied up with others." Internationally, Qatar Airways is the first airline to mandate face shields in addition to face masks for its passengers. Stateside, the recently published Runway to Recovery plan, jointly issued by the Department of Transportation, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, "strongly encouraged" airlines and airports to require masks or cloth face coverings rather than recommending a federal mandate. Stimulating travel safely is important to the nation's economic recovery, according to the U.S. Travel Association, which says the industry is in a depression with 51 percent unemployment. It forecasts that travel spending will decline 519 billion this year because of the pandemic. But recovery, reliant on consumer confidence, might, in part, depend on the feeling of safety offered by providing extra elbow room in the air. "We have decided as a nation that airlines are essential," said Senator Merkley. "In every essential setting, we've asked businesses to make accommodations to minimize the transmission of the virus. In stores, we have masks and sometimes one way aisles. In restaurants, we have tables further apart. It's reasonable to ask airlines to do the maximum they can, like not selling adjacent seats." Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Saturn's outermost ring is made up of an unusual combination of fine dust particles occasionally interspersed with rocks the size of soccer balls, scientists reported in the journal Nature. The faint ring, discovered in 2009, is probably made of material ejected from one of Saturn's moons, Phoebe. With images from NASA's WISE spacecraft, researchers at the University of Maryland discovered that the ring was dominated by small particles, a rarity in our solar system, while the ring itself is enormous, 10 times as big as the E ring, the next largest.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Daniel Radcliffe sets out to save humankind in the final episode of "Miracle Workers." And the first season of the "Temptation Island" reboot comes to a close. MIRACLE WORKERS 10:30 p.m. on TBS. Consider this limited comedy series a truncated, less thought out version of "The Good Place." The show is set in some bureaucratic iteration of the afterlife where very imperfect beings run things, and sparks fly between two unassuming humans. Steve Buscemi stars as a fed up God who announces he's going to blow up the earth and end its troubles for good. Over seven episodes, two angels, Craig (Daniel Radcliffe) and Eliza (Geraldine Viswanathan), try to stop him by answering the prayers of two 20 somethings looking for love. (While in "The Good Place," the universe is constantly working against Eleanor and Chidi's inevitable romance, the humans in "Miracle Workers" are spoiled with divine intervention.) The show comes to a close with "1 Hour," in which a desperate Craig gives his all to save humankind. TEMPTATION ISLAND 10 p.m. on USA. This dating show from the early 2000s found a second life in the reboot mania that is today's television landscape. The first season of the revival, set in Maui, Hawaii, ends with a reunion where four couples decide on the next steps of their relationships. The series has been renewed for a second season, and Mark L. Wahlberg, who created the original, will stay on as host.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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For those who have deleted the holiday classic "Baby, It's Cold Outside" from their festive playlist in recent years, this one's for you. For his new seasonal album, John Legend teamed up with Kelly Clarkson for an updated version of the 75 year old standard, removing some lyrics that have gotten harder for some to stomach in the MeToo era. The song, a duet in which the man tries to persuade the woman to stay at his place, using the weather as a pretext, was written by Frank Loesser in 1944 and has been sung by many pairs over the decades, including Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams; Idina Menzel and Michael Buble; and Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett. "I ought to say no, no, no, sir," the woman sings in the original lyrics. The man asks to move in closer. "My sister will be suspicious," she sings. "Gosh, your lips look delicious," he answers. "Say, what's in this drink?" she wonders aloud.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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LOS ANGELES David Litt, known as President Obama's joke writer in chief, is joining the humor website and studio Funny or Die as it seeks to make even more fun of American politics. Mr. Litt, who left his previous job last month, will become head writer and producer of Funny or Die's operation in Washington. "He's funny, clearly much smarter than all of us, and bears a striking resemblance to 'Tommy Boy' era David Spade, which means a lot," Mike Farah, Funny or Die's president of production, said on Wednesday. Mr. Litt, 29, was a special assistant to Mr. Obama and senior presidential speechwriter until stepping down on Jan. 23. Among his comedic claims to fame is a scripted moment at last year's White House Correspondents' Association dinner when Mr. Obama was joined on stage by his "anger translator," played by the comedian Keegan Michael Key. A video of the performance was viewed more than 35 million times on Facebook.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Look into the night sky on Sunday and you just might see a bright, fuzzy ball with a greenish gray tint. That's because a comet that orbits between Jupiter and the sun will make its closest approach to Earth in centuries, right on the heels of this year's most stunning meteor shower. "The fuzziness is just because it's a ball of gas basically," Tony Farnham, a research scientist in the astronomy department at the University of Maryland, said on Saturday morning after a long night studying the comet at the Discovery Channel Telescope, about 40 miles southeast of Flagstaff, Ariz. "You've got a one kilometer solid nucleus in the middle, and gas is going out hundreds of thousands of miles." The comet glows green because the gases emit light in green wavelengths. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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There's something new in Yellowstone National Park, and it's hot and corrosive. It's also, "been sneaking up on the park for the last 20 years," and has grown to be the size of four soccer fields, said Greg Vaughan, a research scientist with the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. That's not anything to worry about. Carved by ancient volcanic activity and peppered by ever changing, kaleidoscopic natural beauty, Yellowstone, the world's oldest national park, is monitored extremely closely by scientists. As it covers a whopping 3,472 square miles of land across three different states, you can't expect them to spot every single new natural feature the moment it appears. But with some satellite sleuthing, the emerging warm spot has finally been discovered by Dr. Vaughan and his colleagues, who reported the discovery in a blog post on the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory's website earlier this month. This thermal area is the newest addition to a family of many thousands of geothermal features at Yellowstone that are often mercurial and occasionally hyperactive. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Its discovery not only helps scientists better understand how the park is evolving, but it cements the notion that there really is nowhere else like it on the planet. This type of activity might be unusual for other volcanoes, Dr. Vaughan explained, but for Yellowstone, this state of geological excitability is perfectly normal. "It's doing everything you expect an active volcano to do except erupt," he said. Dr. Vaughan's job is to use satellite imagery to map out, measure and monitor thermal areas of the park. Looking through the Landsat 8 satellite's thermal infrared imagery taken in April 2017 during a routine survey, he serendipitously spotted a strange and previously undetected bright feature just south of the Tern Lake Thermal Area within the park, indicating a relatively hot patch was present. Ruling out the possibility of a warm lake, he turned to the National Agriculture Imagery Program, operated by the Department of Agriculture, to find further clues. Every few years, during agricultural growing seasons in the contiguous United States, the government flies over the country and takes high resolution pictures of the vegetation below. Sometimes, these flight paths cover Yellowstone. Dr. Vaughan perused the aerial shots taken of the suspicious region. In 1994, nothing seemed amiss and trees were growing healthily. However, from then through 2017, trees had perished, and the soil had turned a sickly off white color. The only reasonable explanation was that a new thermal area had been covertly growing in the region since the late 1990s, altering the ground's chemistry with its superheated fluids. Helen Robinson, a geothermal expert at Glasgow University, speculated that the precipitation of minerals within cracks or fault lines in the nearby Tern Lake Thermal Area may have sealed off an old pathway for circulating, superheated groundwater. Consequently, the groundwater has been forced to find an alternate route to the surface, leading to the creation of a new thermal area. The United States Geological Survey defines a thermal area as a contiguous section of the ground that contains at least one thermal feature, such as a hot spring or a geyser, as well as hydrothermal mineral deposits, altered rocks and dead vegetation. As with plenty of thermal areas, this new one cropped up in a remote part of the park, which means experts have not yet visited to see what features it contains. Many thermal areas come and go, says Michael Poland, the scientist in charge at Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, so the appearance of a new one isn't anything to worry about. Like all the park's geothermal activity, this new warm spot is not directly connected to the underlying and mostly solid magma reservoir, so its emergence is not a sign that the volcano is about to blow its top. It's simply Yellowstone safely letting off some steam.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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A 25 foot wide Greek Revival style townhouse on a prime tree lined street in Greenwich Village that bought, refurbished and promptly returned to the market, sold for 18,250,000 and was the most expensive closed sale of the week, according to city records. The "Sex and the City" star and her Broadway star husband took a significant loss on the sale. They purchased the stately 1846 brick building at 20 East 10th Street, between Fifth Avenue and University Place, in March 2011 for 18,995,000, and undoubtedly invested more in updates and other changes in addition to the restoration done by the previous owners. But the house failed to attract buyers when it was listed in late 2012 for 24.99 million, according to PropertyShark, or when it was lowered last summer to 22 million; it ultimately sold for 1.7 million below its most recent asking price of 19.95 million. The annual property taxes are about 92,695.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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As businesses flock to new high rises in of the moment New York City neighborhoods, older offices in more traditional business districts appear to be taking a hit. In the last few months, rents in some of those types of buildings have been trimmed, unusual in an industry that is loath to cut prices, especially when other economic indicators are generally sound. Throughout the industry, there is a growing sense that the office market might be overbuilt. "The tide is starting to turn away from a landlord driven market to a tenant driven market," said Heidi Learner, chief economist with the commercial real estate firm Savills Studley, which specializes in tenant representation. "It's not necessarily a signal of desperation. But it is a signal there's a lot of supply out there." Stepped up marketing efforts on behalf of those buildings, involving gifts to brokers beyond what is usually offered, are another sign that some properties may be struggling. If there is a newfound softness in the office leasing market, it appears concentrated in Midtown, whose mid 20th century towers were for decades the place to be for law firms, banks and publishing houses. That is gradually changing. Asking rents at the top buildings in Midtown dropped to about 87 a square foot in the fourth quarter last year from 91 in the third quarter, according to a Savills Studley market report. It was the largest decline among Manhattan office submarkets. In contrast, in Midtown South, the area that encompasses trendy NoMad, Union Square and the meatpacking district, the average asking rent in the third and fourth quarters was the same, 91 a square foot, the report said. This area has become a destination in recent years for start up firms and established companies. Data from other brokerages suggests similar weakness. So far this year, more space in Midtown has been put on the market than taken off, according to CBRE Group, the commercial brokerage. The office vacancy rate in Midtown last month was 7.1 percent, CBRE said, compared with 5.1 percent in Midtown South. Among the properties where rents have been trimmed is 280 Park Avenue, a 1.3 million square foot office complex at East 48th Street that is jointly controlled by SL Green Realty Corporation and Vornado Realty Trust. The 43 story structure is now offering floors at discounted rates as it puts the finishing touches on a 125 million renovation. Steven Durels, an executive vice president of SL Green, said, "If you have to throttle it back, you throttle it back. We meet the market." He noted that the building's vacancy rate of 12 percent was a big improvement over its 55 percent vacancy rate in 2011, when SL Green bought its stake in the property. By some measures, New York's economy is booming. In January, the unemployment rate dropped to 5.3 percent, and the share of the population that is employed is at its highest level in decades. Still, SL Green, which is one of New York's largest commercial landlords and has most of its buildings in Midtown, seems to be bracing for a slower office market. "We expect to see a bit of a rollback in job creation for the first time in the past four or five years in New York City," said Marc Holliday, SL Green's chief executive, in his company's quarterly earnings call in late January. While Midtown might be feeling the brunt of any slowdown, other neighborhoods also seem pinched, based on ads emailed to brokers in recent weeks. Phrases like "aggressive new pricing" were a common feature. An ad for a fourth floor space available at 38 Cooper Square, a converted warehouse in NoHo, for instance, promised "Price slashed." This winter, its asking rent was cut 11 percent, to 58 a square foot, from 65, said Nora Stats, an agent with Coldwell Banker Commercial Alliance who is listing the unit. "If a landlord can hang on to a space that's empty and wait, that's fine," Ms. Stats said. "But most landlords can't wait." As demand slackens, the playing field is expanding, and business districts carved from industrial areas and other nontraditional areas are vying for prominent tenants. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Company, the private equity firm, will decamp to 30 Hudson Yards, a new office tower going up atop train tracks, from 9 West 57th Street, a high rise near Fifth Avenue in Midtown that has been considered one of the city's most prized corporate addresses. Similarly, the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher Flom announced plans to relocate to 1 Manhattan West, another new building in the Hudson Yards area, from 4 Times Square in Midtown. The other major tenant of the Times Square building, which was completed in 1999, was the magazine publisher Conde Nast, which has already relocated to the Financial District. The landlord, the Durst Organization, is now marketing the publisher's empty 800,000 square foot space for 80 to 90 a square foot, according to company officials, after a 100 million renovation to the building. Durst officials said they had no plans yet to lower those rents. While many of the relocations will not actually happen for years, landlords do not seem to be waiting around and are spending more money than usual, brokers say, to entice prospective tenants to check out their spaces. The five agent marketing team for 530 Fifth Avenue, a 26 story, 536,000 square foot limestone edifice completed in the mid 1950s, for instance, recently offered gift cards worth around 150 to entice brokers to view the office space. Even if they did not bring in prospects, they could keep the cards, which analysts said was unusual: Gift cards are typically given only when brokers show up with tenants. "Use the gift as you wish," an email advertising the promotion said. "A new bathing suit, sunglasses, a mai tai, or ahi tuna tacos." The ad also said that any brokers who came by would be taken out for drinks after a walk through. "We run different kinds of promotions for different assets," said William Elder, an executive vice president of RXR Realty, which controls the office portion of the building, at West 44th Street. But Mr. Elder said he would not lower rents to fill the building. The office portion of 530 Fifth Avenue has an occupancy rate around 85 percent range, according to Mr. Elder, who added that asking rents per square foot were 65 to 85. "We are still seeing very healthy, very good activity," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Charge the battery and the Prime drives like an electric car. Once the battery is spent, after about 25 miles, the car drives like any other Prius. As otherworldly as the Prius Prime looks, it's not the offspring of the Transformers leader Optimus. It's Toyota's plug in hybrid variant. The concept is simple: Charge the battery and it drives like an electric car. Once the battery is spent, the Prime drives like any other Prius. Easy peasy. It's not Toyota's first plug in. My neighbor has the first one, based on the third generation Prius, and she has been disappointed with its real world all electric range of 11 miles. Prime, riding on Toyota's new scalable chassis architecture, rectifies that. Toyota claims up to 25 miles in E.V. mode. I saw 24, restraining my inner Mario Andretti. Math class is in session. Don't groan: Numbers are important to plug ins. Prime's main competitor, the Chevrolet Volt, is rated by the Environmental Protection Agency at 53 electric only miles. Over all, the Chevy is less efficient, at 106 miles per gallon equivalent and a 42 m.p.g. average on gasoline alone, compared with Prime's 133 m.p.g. equivalent and 54 m.p.g. The Hyundai Ioniq plug in hybrid, available late this fall, is estimated at 27 electric miles. Including options, my Prime tester with the Advanced package lists for 36,305. That is 3,700 less than a comparably equipped Volt. But the federal tax credits ( 4,502 for the Toyota, 7,500 for the Chevy) wipe out much of the difference. Pencils down. Time for some fun. Compared with the departing generation, this Prius provides a little more engagement. It crisply tracks corners and keeps road noise at bay. This is a comfortable car, not overtly sporty. Toyota has inched closer to Honda's driving dynamics. (The Honda Clarity plug in hybrid, with an estimated 42 mile E.V. range, is waiting in the wings.) Electric motors provide satisfying torque when pulling away from stoplights. Spunky enough off the line, Prime quickly becomes lethargic. Car and Driver clocks 0 to 60 miles an hour in 12.2 seconds in E.V. mode and 10.2 in hybrid mode. Volt does it in 7.9 E.V. and 7.4 hybrid. Commendably, Toyota is making automatic emergency braking standard on nearly all its vehicles. Prime's safety system includes adaptive cruise control that works down to a full stop. Good stuff. Both Prius and Prius Prime get a 1.8 liter 4 cylinder gas engine. Prime uses the same two electric motor/generators as a standard Prius does (a motor becomes a generator when turning in reverse). Prime adds a new clutch, allowing the smallest motor/generator to chip in extra drive force. Total system power to the front tires is 121 horsepower. Under hard throttle, the continuously variable transmission has the mild elastic quality common to C.V.T.s. It's best to leave Prime in Auto E.V. mode. Hybrid mode lets drivers save the battery for urban driving, where it's most efficient. Eco and Sport settings do not radically transform the experience. Prime's big change is a larger lithium ion battery pack, which raises the cargo floor a few inches. A standard Prius takes on six carry on suitcases with the back seats usable. That's two more than the Prime. Toyota recommends a dedicated 15 amp circuit to charge Prime on 120 volt current (taking about five and a half hours if the battery is fully spent). On 240 current, it's two hours and 10 minutes. Shamu must have chosen my tester's white on ebony interior. This bright instrument panel calls for sunglasses on sunny days. A full black instrument panel is available. Volt and Ioniq get traditional gauge clusters in front of the driver. Toyota's gauges remain centered, making the head up display on Advanced models desirable. Advanced also adds semiautonomous parking. All but the 27,985 Plus model get an expansive 11.6 inch LCD touch screen. In both responsiveness and organization, the interface is a good, solid effort. The same cannot be said for the JBL sound system, the best you can get in a Prius. It lacks a full sound, and a rotary volume knob. (I'm not a fan of the touch sensitive surface.) The switches for the heated seats are hidden low and away, nearly out of sight and reach. Minnesotans will be getting in their abdominal crunch workouts during winter months. Prime is strictly a four seater. It seems that a center cushion would fit in the back seat area, but Toyota installed a storage console instead. Two average size adults will be comfortable in back with generous leg and knee room. Ioniq accommodates three in back. So does Volt, but it's more snug. Prime has different front and rear fascias. Its rear glass, held by a carbon fiber hatch frame, has a lovely complex curve. Prius's design is polarizing, though some see the Prime's lines as an improvement. To my eye, it's like choosing between a hairless cat and a hairless dog. But hey, some people think they're both cute.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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The composer, vocalist and French horn player Matt Marks in 2012. He died in May, at 38, and his work "The Little Death: Vol. 1" will be revived by the Prototype festival on Tuesday. In May, the musician Matt Marks died suddenly, of heart failure, after a performance with the ensemble Alarm Will Sound. It was a blow to the tight knit world of contemporary music, in which the 38 year old Mr. Marks was a prominent presence as a composer, vocalist and French horn player. Along with his prolific compositional output, he helped found Alarm Will Sound, as well as the New Music Gathering conference, and was a provocatively humorous mainstay on social media. Read the New York Times obituary for Mr. Marks. This community rallied to memorialize him. Alarm Will Sound started the Matt Marks Impact Fund to develop new works. Several of his close friends completed his score for a theatrical piece, "Words on the Street," which had its debut in October. And on Tuesday at Roulette in Brooklyn, the Prototype: Opera/Theater/Now festival which presented Mr. Marks's opera "Mata Hari" in 2017 and runs from Jan. 5 through 13 this year will revive his breakthrough 2010 work "The Little Death: Vol. 1." "He was such a strong advocate for my own music and getting it out there," she added, "that this is the smallest way for me to return the favor." Much of Mr. Marks's music draws together a permissive polystylism with a comedic irreverence toward the ritual trappings of classical music. In a 2016 recording he posted on SoundCloud, he dramatically and hilariously recited the pianist Khatia Buniatishvili's hagiographic website biography atop the majestic theme from "Jurassic Park." But his death has also brought into stark relief the intense intimacy that is the basis of several of his works, which were conceived during and are partly about personal relationships, and which now have a new emotional rawness. This is particularly apparent in the upcoming production of "The Little Death," which Mr. Marks originally created in close collaboration with the soprano Mellissa Hughes while they were dating, and which has not been performed since they broke up in 2012. In 2006, as young New York based classical music freelance artists, Mr. Marks and Ms. Hughes met on a bizarre gig: a PBS crossover special being filmed in Miami, in which their live performance was replaced by canned audio. They reconnected on Myspace, where Mr. Marks had posted some simple songs he had written. As they began dating, Mr. Marks's compositions became more serious, and he increasingly wrote specifically for Ms. Hughes's voice, culminating in "The Little Death." Starring Mr. Marks and Ms. Hughes and billed as a "post Christian nihilist pop opera," it presented a love story of religious and sexual awakenings reinforced by Mr. Marks's intricately wrought, omnivorous score: One exuberant duet combines electropop and the shape note hymn "Wondrous Love." Mr. Marks and Ms. Hughes worked on Vol. 2, but the project ended with their relationship. "I haven't even sung through any of it or even really hummed through it since 2012," Ms. Hughes said. "When you create something like that with somebody, it becomes a part of you, and so when you're no longer with that person, it's hard to revisit." Electronic samples on the album, and passages in Mr. Marks's libretto, memorialize inside jokes and moments in their real life romance. "When I hear these things, it's hard to remember," Ms. Hughes said. "It's like an audio graveyard." "But it's also beautiful," she added. "It was a time in both of our lives that we were so creative, and we were young and poor and nobody knew us, and so we didn't care. We wrote what we wrote." That sincerity was a through line in Mr. Marks's music, and motivated his exhaustive engagement with musical genres that might be looked down on by other composers. "One of the things that I respect about Christian music and Christian pop music is that they're willing to get sentimental," he told The Brooklyn Rail in 2010. "I think you can actually mess with people's heads way more by going the sentimental route, playing with their heartstrings." Since his death, moments on the "Little Death" album that might have once sounded arch hokey chord progressions, campy melodic hooks can unexpectedly arouse tears. "So many of the pieces that he wrote for himself to sing, it would not work without him," said the composer Ted Hearne. Mr. Hearne sang in a "praise choir" assembled to accompany an early run of "The Little Death," and will take on Mr. Marks's part for the Prototype revival. Since the piece lacks a fully notated score, Mr. Hearne is learning the music primarily by listening closely to the album. "I have to be able to perform it with as much confidence and moxie and guts as he would," he said. He helped persuade Ms. Hughes to sing, telling her, she recalled, "If you don't do it, the piece dies with Matt." "The Little Death" was Ms. Kouyoumdjian's first introduction to Mr. Marks's music. She was so captivated by a 2010 performance that, as she was leaving the concert, she walked into a glass door and broke her nose. She and Mr. Marks met a couple years later to discuss a potential collaboration with her ensemble, Hotel Elefant, and began dating. (That project was recorded before Mr. Marks's death, and will be part of a future release of his music on New Amsterdam.) Mr. Marks was a longtime resident of Brooklyn, and he and Ms. Kouyoumdjian would often visit unfamiliar parts of the borough. One such excursion involved a bus trip during which they shared a pair of headphones to listen to Mariah Carey to the serene Salt Marsh Nature Center in Marine Park. Not long afterward, Mr. Marks began a new project, the pop monodrama "Headphone Splitter," which takes a lightly fictionalized account of their date as its point of departure: The characters Matt and Baby cozily split headphones on the B41 to go bird watching on a lazy Saturday, and witness a brutal ax murder. "Having this sixth sense of twisting everything sweet into something really dark, he thought, 'Oh, this would be the perfect beginning for this murder mystery,'" Ms. Kouyoumdjian said. With the director Nick Leavens, "Headphone Splitter" was to be developed into a series of music videos driven by Mr. Marks's singing, although he only recorded the first three episodes. In Chapter 1, atop swirlingly catchy electronics, Mr. Marks narrates the bus adventure with his characteristically zany swagger "Baby, go on, pull out your headphone splitter. Sit close, we'll listen to the soundtrack of 'Glitter'" followed by the sudden homicide. "It has so many elements of things Matt that loved so much," Ms. Kouyoumdjian said: Brooklyn, low budget horror films, macabre humor. "The music that he was writing more recently goes back to the music he was writing for 'The Little Death,'" Ms. Kouyoumdjian added. "Projects like 'Headphone Splitter' that really celebrated him as a composer performer, and were projects that he could do on his own. He could write his own text, which was something he loved; he could direct the idea and the vision of the project; and he could just sit at his computer and write and produce." She is planning to release the two other episodes Mr. Marks completed, and may finish some of the rest of the series herself, although a crowdfunding campaign to support the project did not meet its goal. While Ms. Kouyoumdjian has been active as a composer she has collaborated with the Kronos Quartet and is preparing a commission for the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth she has lately focused more on tending Mr. Marks's body of work. "It's a lot easier for me to put energy toward his projects happening, at this point, than for my own," she said. "Composition is really tricky. It really requires a lot of emotional vulnerability, and I think that that's a space that's difficult to be in for long periods of time after you lose somebody." "Helping Matt's music be a little more public," she added, "is my way of still doing creative work, but in a way that feels right to me, right now."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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This five bedroom, three bathroom house is in Evian, on the shore of Lake Geneva, in eastern France. Dating to the 16th century and completely refurbished about 15 years ago, it is one of the oldest homes in Evian, and at one time belonged to the family that owned the land where the area's namesake mineral water was discovered, said Laurent Guerineau, an agent with Knight Frank, which has the listing. Built from local stone, with shuttered windows and a tile roof, the three level home sits on about 0.4 acres in a residential area overlooking the lake, a few minutes' drive from the waterfront. The main entrance opens into a stone hallway, which leads to a large dining room. Like the rest of the house, the room has oak floors and wide oak ceiling beams. A wood fired bread oven built into a dining room wall is about a century old and still functional, Mr. Guerineau said. A plate glass window in the dining room offers views of the lake, with Switzerland on the horizon, and a glass door opens onto a terrace with a large lawn below. An adjoining living room has a fireplace and a window looking out on the front yard. The kitchen, also off the dining room, is small, with dark wood cabinets and pink tile. Nearby are a bedroom and a bathroom with a shower. The second floor has two bedrooms, as well as a lounge area with a wooden stairway leading to the home's top level and a door to a glass walled terrace overlooking the lake. There are two bathrooms, one of which has a large copper soaking tub, a wood toilet with a copper bowl and ornate fixtures. The top level, in the eaves, has a sitting area and two additional bedrooms, one with a window overlooking the lake. The front yard has a covered stone patio and a heated swimming pool, installed last year, Mr. Guerineau said. A stone staircase leads up from the pool area to a second floor terrace on the west side of the house. The basement level has four cavelike alcoves for storage. Evian is a municipality in the mountainous Haute Savoie region of France, which shares borders with Switzerland and Italy. It gained renown for its thermal spas in the 19th century, and its resorts and spas continue to draw tourists. This property is about a five minute drive from the downtown area, a lively lakeside district with a variety of restaurants, hotels, parks and cultural attractions. It is within walking distance of a station for the historic funicular railway, which runs to downtown and dates to the early 1900s, Mr. Guerineau said. Trains are available to the Swiss city of Geneva (about 28 miles west) and to Paris (about 360 miles northwest). Geneva Airport is about an hour's drive, and there is a ferry service to the city of Lausanne, directly across Lake Geneva on the Swiss coast. The French housing market has gained strength over the past few years because of low interest rates, targeted tax incentives and higher inventory, according to a recent property market report from the Notaries of France. Around Evian, along the southern shore of Lake Geneva, the market has been fairly stable, with flat prices but steady activity driven by two reliable sources, Swiss commuters and second home buyers, said Pierre Laugier, the managing owner of Evian Immobilier Sotheby's International Realty. "Because we are near the border of Switzerland, lots of people who work there live here on the French side, because it's much cheaper," he said, explaining that homes in Switzerland often cost at least twice as much as those in France. About half of the market activity in Evian is second homes, with Middle Easterners in particular drawn to high end waterfront properties, said Jean Philippe Allemand, an agent with Barnes Leman. Prices for large lakefront homes start at around 2 million euros, or 2.3 million, and can go well above that: Not long ago, a "small castle" on the lake between Evian and Geneva sold for more than 10 million euros, or 11.6 million, Mr. Allemand said. The average price of a second home away from the waterfront is typically between 750,000 and 1 million euros, or about 870,000 and 1.2 million, Mr. Allemand said, adding that new apartments are most in demand, as buyers do not want to worry about maintenance when they are not using the property. Overall, the median sales price for a home in Evian is about 4,500 a square meter, or 418 a square foot, according to the Notaries of France. The median sales price for resale apartments is about 3,500 a square meter, or 325 a square foot; the median for new apartments is closer to 5,500 a square meter, or 510 a square foot.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Ryan Young for The New York Times; Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times; Amanda Lucier for The New York Times Ryan Young for The New York Times; Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times; Amanda Lucier for The New York Times Credit... Ryan Young for The New York Times; Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times; Amanda Lucier for The New York Times For a fashion model, success is the ability to incite desire. The job requirements often include nudity and feigning seduction; provocation is a lever for sales. In the industry, boundaries between the acceptable and the unacceptable treatment of models have been etched in shades of gray. This has allowed prominent photographers to cross the line with impunity for decades, sexually exploiting models and assistants. The experience, once seen as the price models had to pay for their careers, is now being called something else: abuse of power and sexual harassment. Fifteen current and former male models who worked with Bruce Weber, whose racy advertisements for companies like Calvin Klein and Abercrombie Fitch helped turn him into one of the foremost commercial and fine art photographers, have described to The New York Times a pattern of what they said was unnecessary nudity and coercive sexual behavior, often during photo shoots. The men recalled, with remarkable consistency, private sessions with Mr. Weber in which he asked them to undress and led them through breathing and "energy" exercises. Models were asked to breathe and to touch both themselves and Mr. Weber, moving their hands wherever they felt their "energy." Often, Mr. Weber guided their hands with his own. "I remember him putting his fingers in my mouth, and him grabbing my privates," said the model Robyn Sinclair. "We never had sex or anything, but a lot of things happened. A lot of touching. A lot of molestation." In accounts going back to the mid 1990s, 13 male assistants and models who have worked with the photographer Mario Testino, a favorite of the English royal family and Vogue, told The Times that he subjected them to sexual advances that in some cases included groping and masturbation. Representatives for both photographers said they were dismayed and surprised by the allegations. "I'm completely shocked and saddened by the outrageous claims being made against me, which I absolutely deny," Mr. Weber said in a statement from his lawyer. Lavely Singer, a law firm that represents Mr. Testino, challenged the characters and credibility of people who complained of harassment, and also wrote that it had spoken to several former employees who were "shocked by the allegations" and that those employees "could not confirm any of the claims." In fashion, young men are particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Male models are "the least respected and most disposable," said the former model Trish Goff. "It was general practice to give a model a heads up about a specific photographer who we knew had a certain reputation," said Gene Kogan of his time working as an agent at Next Management between 1996 and 2002. But, he said, "If you said you were not going to work with someone like Bruce Weber or Mario Testino, you might as well just pack it in and go work in another industry." As in Hollywood, allegations of harassment and assault have been aired periodically over the decades with little lasting effect. From agents to stylists to fashion brands, the system has traditionally seemed more invested in preserving its image of perfection and glamour than in recognizing its bad actors. Regular revelations of abuse of female models as far back as a "60 Minutes" investigation of modeling agencies in Paris in 1988 faded away. Agents accused of raping young models in their charge continued to work. The photographer Terry Richardson, after being accused in one documentary of sexual assault of female models, continued to work for major fashion brands until reporting on the producer Harvey Weinstein changed the landscape. The casting took place at Mr. Testino's hotel. Instead of greeting Mr. Locke in the lobby, Mr. Testino was in his room, where he opened the door in a loose robe, Mr. Locke said. Then they got into a stalemate about whether the model needed to go fully nude for test pictures. After Gucci hired Mr. Locke for an ad campaign, Mr. Testino was aggressive and flirtatious throughout, Mr. Locke said. On the last day of the shoot, as they were taking photographs on a bed, Mr. Testino said, "I don't think he's feeling it. Everybody out," Mr. Locke recalled. "He shuts the door and locks it. Then he crawls on the bed, climbs on top of me and says, 'I'm the girl, you're the boy.' I went at him, like, you better get away. I threw the towel on him, put my clothes on and walked out," Mr. Locke said. Tom Ford, then the designer for Gucci, said he had not been present and could not know what happened. He said he was sympathetic to anyone who had been harassed, but also cautioned that if a photographer needs a shot of a model's face on a bed, there are very few angles to get it from. Former assistants said that Mr. Testino had a pattern of hiring young, usually heterosexual men and subjecting them to increasingly aggressive advances. Hugo Tillman was not long out of Occidental College when he started freelancing as a photo assistant for Mr. Testino in 1996. Mr. Testino took him and his mother to lunch and told them he wanted to mentor him. "I really liked him I really looked up to him," Mr. Tillman said. "Sexual harassment was a constant reality," said Roman Barrett, an assistant to Mr. Testino in the late '90s who said the photographer rubbed up against his leg with an erection and masturbated in front of him. "He misbehaved in hotel rooms, the backs of cars and on first class flights," he said. "Then things would go back to normal, and that made you feel gaslighted." Another assistant to Mr. Testino, a decade later, said he had his pants pulled down and buttocks fondled while on the job. Yet another said that Mr. Testino masturbated on him during a business trip. Both were granted anonymity because they feared career repercussions. Even those who worked for Mr. Testino without experiencing the most direct harassment were affected. "I saw him with his hands down people's pants at least 10 times," said Thomas Hargreave, a shoot producer who worked frequently with Mr. Testino between 2008 and 2016. "Mario behaved often as if it was all a big joke. But it wasn't funny. And the guys being placed in these situations wouldn't know how to react. They would look at me, like, 'What's going on? How do I deal with this?' It was terrible." Lavely Singer, the law firm that represents Mr. Testino, said in a letter in response to these accounts that the individuals who spoke with The Times "cannot be considered reliable sources." They wrote that Mr. Tillman had spoken well of Mr. Testino before, and called his mental health into question, so it "would be extremely reckless" to rely on him as a source. Regarding Mr. Fedele, who complained about private nude shoots, Mr. Testino's lawyers said that the model had been photographed nude by others and had posted a nude picture of himself, taken by Herb Ritts, to Instagram in 2015. They also wrote that Mr. Hargreave and Mr. Barrett were disgruntled former employees. "I was pushed around, overworked, underpaid and sexually harassed daily," Mr. Barrett said. "That's why I was disgruntled." "I'm telling the truth because this needs to stop now," Mr. Hargreave said. As Calvin Klein, who created a hypersexual image for his brand with the help of Mr. Weber, recently told The Times, "I picked the images the same way I always did: what got my heart racing." (Mr. Weber has not worked with the brand that bears Mr. Klein's name since 2008.) Whatever it takes to get that shot has been acceptable. Jessie English, a female photographer who spent three years as an assistant primarily to male photographers before going out on her own, described the attitude she saw on fashion shoots this way: "If I need to touch you between your legs or grab your breasts so you get the right look on your face, that's just the way it is." Fashion and media brands say it is up to agencies to protect models, while the agencies say it is up to the brands not to hire photographers with bad reputations. For their part, the photographers say they do what they do to get the best picture which is what the clients want. And no union exists for models, whose youth and eagerness for a measure of stardom make them disinclined to complain. "Models are not educated about what is or is not acceptable behavior, and often don't even have the vocabulary to express their experiences," said Edward Siddons, a model turned journalist. "Male models are paid much less and they do not become icons, because the culture is about objectifying women to sell things, and people are deeply uncomfortable with that happening to men," Mr. Ford said. "I knew that if people didn't want to have sex with you and people didn't find you beautiful, you weren't much inspiration," Taber said. "The models that got jobs are the ones stylists and photographers are into. I also wanted people to like me, especially the most powerful people in the business. I would almost get offended if they didn't want to have sex with me. That's how I got groomed. That's how it worked in my mind." Advances often take place in casting sessions and private photo shoots, Mr. Fedele said, reflecting partly on his experience with Mr. Testino. "Those are the pivot points for photographers to test the waters on whether or not it's going to be a challenge for them to get to you," he said. "Because if you do get the job, the majority of the time you're not naked and you're not in a swimsuit. So what's really happening is that these guys are gauging whether you're open or shy or close minded or, quite frankly, whether you're gay or hetero and willing either to flirt with them or to submit to an advance." Since the 1970s, Mr. Weber, 71, has been one of the most important commercial and fine art photographers. His name has become "synonymous with erotically charged depictions of good looking young men," The Times wrote in 1999. "It's like I was willing and unwilling at the same time," he said. "I wanted to work." Models say that Mr. Weber was given to private audiences with young men, on long walks during lunch breaks and private visits in his room. "They even have a term for it: 'He's going to get Brucified,'" said Rudi Dollmayer, a Swedish model who shot with Mr. Weber three times. "It's presented as an option, but it isn't really," Erin Williams, a female model on two of Mr. Weber's campaigns for Abercrombie Fitch, said of working nude. In testimony to the New York City Commission on Human Rights, she wrote: "The models that didn't go nude were always cut on day two, and those who did would stay for additional shoot days. The boys who would socialize with Bruce after the shoots, alone in his hotel room, would get booked for longer with the carrot of a major campaign being dangled in front of them." In 2011, during a shoot for Vogue Hommes International in Miami, Mr. Weber summoned the model Josh Ardolf, then 20, to a private room. Mr. Weber photographed him in the nude and then, when Mr. Ardolf seemed uncomfortable, led him through an exercise. "I was guiding his hand," Mr. Ardolf said. "We did the chest, the shoulders, the head. Then I finally put his hand on my abs. Did the breathing. Right after that, he forced his hand right on my genitals. I was first in shock. I didn't know what to think. I backed up. I felt very, very uncomfortable and very sick." "I felt helpless," Mr. Ardolf said. "Like my agency said, he has a lot of power. He's done a lot of large campaigns. That was in the back of my mind. 'I can't screw this up. I already made it this far.'" "It unfolded slowly," Mr. Wood said. "He's directing you, and the peak moment is when you're fully exposed and being told to hold it. 'Hold that pose.' And you're wondering what the pictures are even for. Because you're not on set. You're thinking, 'This isn't what I'm getting paid for.'" He also felt guilty, he said, knowing that he'd agreed to show Mr. Weber his penis only because "he was the photographer for Ralph Lauren." Mr. Weber did end up booking him for a Ralph Lauren campaign. Bobby Roache, a model who went for a casting with Mr. Weber in 2007 and left after he said the photographer tried to "stick his hands down my pants," described the reaction from one of his agents: "That's all he did? You should have gone further." The model Monty Hooper said Mr. Weber told him he had "to learn to be more vulnerable" at a test shoot at the photographer's TriBeCa studio in 2014. At the shoot, Mr. Hooper stopped undressing before revealing his genitals, so Mr. Weber led him through a breathing exercise. "If I'm more vulnerable," Mr. Hooper said he was told, "I'll go a lot farther in my career modeling." "He was hugging me really closely," Mr. Hooper said. Disturbed, he thanked Mr. Weber and left. After that, he said, the amount of work he was sent for dried up immediately. Mr. Hooper was roommates with a number of models in an apartment maintained by Soul Artist Management, many of whom worked with Mr. Weber. "This is big for you. You have to nail this," the agency's founder, Jason Kanner, told one of them, Jason Boyce, before a test shoot, according to a lawsuit Mr. Boyce filed in December in New York State Supreme Court against Mr. Weber, Mr. Kanner and Little Bear Inc., the production company run by the photographer's companion and agent, Nan Bush. In his complaint, Mr. Boyce said that Mr. Weber groped him and kissed him. In a response filed in late December, lawyers for Mr. Weber described the entire complaint as "false." (Mr. Kanner indicated he would respond as well this month.) Mr. Boyce's lawyer is Lisa Bloom, who represented Harvey Weinstein at the time he was first accused of sexual misconduct but who more often represents harassment claimants. At the lawsuit's announcement which Mr. Weber's lawyers described as a "defamatory press conference" in their filing Ms. Bloom produced another roommate, Mark Ricketson, who said that Mr. Weber also led him through an inappropriate exercise in 2005, when he was 18. "I have used common breathing exercises and professionally photographed thousands of nude models over my career, but never touched anyone inappropriately. Given my life's work, these twisted and untrue allegations are truly disheartening. I've been taking pictures for over 40 years and have the utmost respect for everyone I've ever photographed. I would never, ever, try to hurt anyone or prevent someone from succeeding it's just not in my character," Mr. Weber said in his statement to The Times. Jeff Aquilon, a longtime muse whom Mr. Weber discovered in 1978, said in December that he had never had a bad experience with the photographer. "What I've heard over the last couple of days is so uncharacteristic of what I would expect out of him that it kind of blew my mind," Mr. Aquilon said. "I did speak to him a day or two ago. I said: 'Bruce, I can't believe what is out there. Sorry to hear what you're going to have to go through here.' He just said, 'Will you pray for us?' I said I definitely would."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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If you're east of the Mississippi and craving a fresh beer from the other side of the country, no need to hop on a plane. Instead, the breweries are coming to you. Colorado's Oskar Blues Brewery started the great craft beer migration a few years ago, when it delighted fans by establishing a second location in Brevard, N.C., a small mountain town. Since then, the California based Sierra Nevada Brewing Company and Lagunitas Brewing Company have followed suit. Sierra Nevada opened a sprawling brewery, tap room and restaurant in Mills River, N.C., while Lagunitas set up shop in Chicago. New Belgium Brewing has opened a production facility and tasting room in Asheville, N.C. Later this year, San Diego's Green Flash Brewing will bring a satellite site to Virginia Beach, Va. And Oskar Blues is not slowing down, with plans to open a third location this summer, staking the middle ground Austin, Tex. (Atwater Brewery in Detroit with Flemish Fox Brewery Craftworks also recently announced plans to open in Austin.) At Sierra Nevada's spot flanking the Blue Ridge Mountains, visitors can dine at the 400 seat restaurant and catch a show in the amphitheater.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Classical mythology brings us the tale of the Sibyl of Cumae, a prophetess who bargains with Apollo for endless life, and centuries later comes to yearn for death. She failed to negotiate for eternal youth, you see, and with the years she grows shrunken and decrepit and miserable. The story echoes a sentiment that endures in contemporary life: However much time kale, yoga, spa weekends and wonder drugs may buy us, we accept that at some point we'll become so enfeebled that we'll be ready to pack it in, once and for all. But what if rolled into endless life were endless youth, and we kept looking and feeling our best, century after century? Would we still, like the Cumaean Sibyl, wish to die? Yup. This is the answer provided by the hero of 's captivating new novel, "Eternal Life." When we meet Rachel, she's a suburban great grandmother, recently widowed, with a ne'er do well adult son living in the basement. What her family doesn't know is that she's 2,000 some odd years old. And while she may look like a senior citizen now, anytime Rachel burns to death (happens more than you'd think over the course of millenniums), she wakes up in her 18 year old body, physically equipped to begin life all over again. But every new "version," as Rachel calls her countless iterations of work, family and home, brings another cycle of grief and loss. The loved ones who surround her in the 21st century mostly remind her of the scores of loved ones who've died. For Rachel, the present is coated in thick layers of the past. And her relationships, particularly with her children, have taken on a numbing predictability. As Horn writes, "At one point she tried to estimate how many thousands of times she had nursed an infant, how many meals she had cooked for others, how many spoons of medicine she had raised to other people's lips, how many withered hands she had held at bedsides, how many bodies she had buried in the earth." Rachel's perspective as a fixed point among ordinary mortals heading from cradle to grave makes her feel isolated, detached not fully alive, despite (or really because of) her immortality. So Rachel is eager to die. Her problem is she can't. And she's given it her best shot: attempted suicide in numerous forms, sought the counsel over the centuries of everyone from ancient holy men to cognitive behavioral therapists.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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"Hello, this is Bong Joon Ho, director of 'Parasite.' This is the story about infiltration. One family infiltrates to other family. This is in the middle of that process. that kind of moment." "Simply speaking, it's just something like 'Mission: Impossible,' the TV series when I was a little kid. I was a huge fan. And this some kind of nerdy family version of 'Mission: Impossible.'" "In this moment for the young son, he is kind of manipulator. He controls everything. And he has a plan. When they rehearse, it looks like a kind of filmmaking. It is like the son is director, the father is the actor." "I intentionally shoot those shots very quickly and some very spontaneous reaction and sudden, small, improvised. And something happened very naturally. Rolling the camera, that kind of momentary feeling is very important." Bong Joon Ho's latest film joins a growing list of movies criticizing South Korean inequality a problem so pervasive it has given birth to its own slang. The title of the scathing new South Korean film "Parasite" refers to the Kim family , destitute basement dwellers who try to climb the social ladder by leeching off the wealthy Park family. While the Kims worry about money, the extravagant Parks worry about poor people's unpleasant smell . The families' lifestyles couldn't be more different. The Kims' tiny dining room window looks into a street that doubles as a urinal for drunks. The Parks' giant panes have a view of their meticulously mowed lawn surrounded by manicured hedges. The Kims eat cheap pizza. The Parks' favorite casual meal involves premium beef. The movie is the latest South Korean film to pit the haves against the have nots: see this year's No. 1 movie there, "Extreme Job," as well as recent titles like "Burning" and 2013's " Snowpiercer ." It's no coincidence that income inequality is a recurring theme in the nation's cinema. Experts say the films, for the most part big hits at home , capture the essence of Korean sentiments at a time when the country's income gap continues to widen. "People who are born with a gold spoon are the ones who have made it," the professor said. "The have nots are dirt spoons. They will always be given a dirt spoon, and it will always be a struggle." The lack of social mobility for dirt spoons is at the heart of "Parasite," directed by Bong Joon Ho. The Kims are each smart and talented in their own ways. Yet they are so poor they crouch next to a toilet just to steal a neighbor's Wi Fi that there is no clear path for them to succeed. Though economically disadvantaged Americans face a similar plight, in South Korea, job prospects can be tied to family background, as when employers ask about applicants' parents , a practice that could favor the privileged, Kim, the professor, said . Furthermore, investigations have uncovered nepotistic practices, like private schools' preference for installing family members in teaching positions. So why not fake it till you make it? In "Parasite," the Kims' son, Ki woo, fluent in English, uses a referral from a privileged friend and counterfeit college credentials to trick the Parks into giving him a job as a language tutor for their teenage daughter. Ki woo's sister, Ki jung, pretends to be an art therapist and gets hired to work with the Parks' disturbed little boy. Dad and Mom soon join the subterfuge by posing as a professional driver and a housemaid for the Parks, who are as gullible as they are neurotic about cleanliness. Last year's "Burning," from the director Lee Chang dong, also portrayed the social divide in a dark story, in that case an awkward love triangle. Jongsu, a farmer's son who dreams of being a writer, and Ben, an inexplicably wealthy man who drives a Porsche, both lust after the quirky Haemi. Even though Jongsu has a fling with Haemi, it becomes clear that this dirt spoon is no match for Ben, who offers Haemi entry into the gold spoon club. In "Snowpiercer," another Bong film, the gap between the privileged and the disadvantaged couldn't be more apparent. The postapocalyptic thriller puts Earth's only human survivors on a train in perpetual motion, with the haves occupying luxurious cars toward the front, where they enjoy sushi, and the have nots living in the tail end, where they feed on gelatinous protein blocks composed of cockroaches. The only way for the dirt spoons to improve their situation is to fight and kill their way to the front of the train. (Spoiler: Nobody wins.) Some Korean films give social inequality a lighter parody treatment. "Extreme Job," from the director Lee Byeong heon, centers on a team of broke police officers who open a fried chicken restaurant as part of a sting operation to catch drug dealers. The restaurant becomes a booming success, and the officers quickly become distracted by their lucrative side hustle. Frustration over social injustice in South Korea spilled over in 2016 largely because of corruption. That year, the country's president, Park Geun hye, was impeached over accusations of bribery, extortion and abuse of power. Central to Park's ouster was the revelation that she had worked closely with Choi Soon sil, who was convicted of conspiring with university officials and professors to help her daughter, Chung Yoo ra, a student getting high marks despite rarely attending lectures or completing assignments. For many Koreans, the scandals epitomized the dirty behavior and unfair advantages of the rich and powerful. " Parasite" may resonate with South Koreans because it contains many references to current events there. One viewer, NaYeon Yang, a psychology student at the University of Maryland who moved to the United States from South Korea when she was a teenager, spotted several examples , like Ki woo's fake college credentials an allusion to the Choi scandal. Chung, Choi's daughter, used falsified records to graduate from high school. More recently, crowds of protesters have called for the ouster of Cho Kuk, South Korea's justice minister, who faces accusations of, among other things, pulling strings to help his daughter. Cho's wife was indicted on a charge of forging a certificate to help their daughter get into medical school. In another scene in "Parasite," the wealthy father recoils from the stench of an impoverished man who is his loyal supporter. This may be a reference to the impeached president, who was seen on TV news hiding her hands behind her back when a supporter reached out to shake her hand. The incident went viral.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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The lack of such complication is what makes the 2014 Honda CBR650F such a breath of fresh air. The design of the CBR650F is similar to other members of the middleweight sport class, but don't confuse it with hard core supersports machines like Honda's CBR600RR, even though both have 4 cylinder engines and slick cowlings. The first hint of the difference is apparent in a glance at the price tag: 9,309 for the 650F compared with 11,800 for the racetrack ready 600RR (prices include the destination charge). There are many contributing factors in that price gap, among them the CBR600RR's sophisticated, multiadjustable suspension and a 50 pound weight reduction. Those advantages, along with a multitude of other refinements, make the RR a far more suitable mount for the rider with racing aspirations. The competition level hardware is far less vital for enjoying a bike on the street, and the 650F's simpler approach results in a more rational price. Though years past the era when it would have been called the leading edge of technology, the 650F's gear works very well. The conventional front fork (not an inverted design) offers no adjustment of compression or rebound damping, yet its factory settings proved well suited to my size and riding style. Likewise, the twin piston front calipers are not the latest radial mounts, but they perform very well in real world riding on public roads, where you should not be pushing the limits of traction and luck. My test was not a casual Sunday ride, but more like an end of the earth evaluation. The vacation was in Australia I picked up the bike in Melbourne, caught the ferry to Tasmania, and with my daughter (who was riding a Yamaha FZ6) chalked up 1,500 miles exploring the sights (which included the Great Ocean Road when we returned to the Australian mainland). For me, the ergonomics were just about perfect the handlebars were low enough to keep me out of the wind blast, though a little more fairing protection would have been appreciated on chilly mornings and the seat was perfectly acceptable for a factory unit. The engine, dyno tested at 78 horsepower by Cycle World, may not have been awe inspiring, but it was fully up to the job on Tasmania's roads, where speed limits topped out at 110 kilometers per hour (about 68 m.p.h.).
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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REGINALD K. BRACK JR. graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1959 and headed west to St. Louis to take a job selling advertising for The Saturday Evening Post. Three years later, he was sitting on an airplane and struck up a conversation with a man who turned out to be the publisher of Time Magazine. "A lot of life is serendipity," Mr. Brack said of that seat assignment. But then came the hard work. Mr. Brack was recruited to join Time a few months after that flight, and he stayed there for the next 37 years. In 1986, he was named chief executive of Time's magazine division and chief executive of Time Inc. in 1990. He retired as chairman in 1997 and stayed on for two more years as nonexecutive chairman. Mr. Brack's rise through the corporate ranks was a classic self made man story his father worked in the airline industry in Dallas and it was also accompanied by great wealth, in salary and stock. Yet even though his earnings increased over the years, he said he paid little attention to it. Now in retirement, he is faced with some choices. As a member of Tiger 21, an elite investment club, he has at least its minimum of 10 million the net worth that currently makes a married couple subject to the federal estate tax but he does not want to say how much he has beyond that amount. "I don't have near the wealth people think I do," he said. "I'm certainly not poor, but I don't count myself as a great, wealthy American." Mr. Brack would rather talk about his working years than money any day. He was the first person to run the company who had not gone to an Ivy League college and also the first chief executive who started his career in sales, not journalism or finance. He also appointed the first female publisher at any Time magazine. But now that Mr. Brack, 73, is working less, he has time to think about his wealth. He sits on several boards, including that of Fieldpoint Private Bank and Trust, which he helped found, in Greenwich, Conn., where he lives. But he is less busy than he was in his days at Time. Financially, he thinks about his cash flow needs, his charity and his family; he is married with three grown children. Self made executives often delay wealth planning, said Sharon H. Jacquet, managing director in J. P. Morgan Private Bank, who runs a team that works with senior executives of public and private companies. "Not thinking about finances until retirement is not uncommon," she said. "Really successful C.E.O.'s put the priority on doing their job as a C.E.O. They have a comfortable lifestyle and adequate financial resources, and they don't focus on it." In his professional life, Mr. Brack said he concentrated on work during the week and his family the rest of the time. This helped him be successful, but it also left him in his 70s with a seemingly diffuse financial plan. Early on, he started with an adviser in Allentown, Pa., who persuaded him to sell some of his high concentration of Time Warner stock ahead of his retirement. This diversification helped Mr. Brack, and he remains loyal to his adviser. Mr. Brack chose the Royal Bank of Canada to create his municipal bond portfolio after a search many years ago to determine which firm had the top muni management team. He credits that part of his portfolio with helping him sleep during the financial crisis. "I was frightened, but I was comforted by that muni bond portfolio," he said. His third adviser, after the team at the Royal Bank, works for Fieldpoint Private Bank and Trust and counsels him on estate issues, equities and new managers. While three advisers may seem like too many cooks in the kitchen, Ms. Jacquet said it could work if one of them had the entire financial and legal picture, even if someone else was managing the assets. Mr. Brack said Fieldpoint has the full picture of his finances. Estate planning is crucial for Mr. Brack and his wife. When they die, there will almost certainly be money left over. But they do not have so much that he feels comfortable taking advantage of the generous gift tax exemption of 5 million per person that is in effect for the next two years. (This is separate from the annual gift exclusion of 13,000.) "That would be a serious diminution to our lifestyle," he said. The first time he tried to talk to his three children about their estate it was awkward. "The boys were very interested and asked a lot of questions," he said. "Our daughter put it back in the envelope and said this is not going to happen." Two years ago, he convened everyone again for a more formal discussion that was moderated by his adviser at Fieldpoint. "All the people who worked with us and our outside attorney were there," he said. "Our children had questions that were really great." That said, he limited the meeting to his children, leaving out his daughter in law. Ms. Jacquet said this was not uncommon and was not, ultimately, harmful from a planning perspective. "The real issue is they should know what the plans provide for," she said. "What happens in the event that he is hit by a bus? In some families there is one individual who is responsible, so it doesn't need to be that everyone knows everything." One of the things he and his wife have done to keep their family close is set up a foundation to give to charities they like but also to help their children and grandchildren talk openly about the purpose of their wealth. Family members make pitches for particular charities and they all vote on which ones to support. "Our focus is small things where a little bit of money matters," he said, adding the gifts are under 10,000 and more often around 3,000. "We give five or six grants per year with one or two repeats." One constant is animal welfare and a charity called Animal Aid Unlimited, which is based in Seattle and runs an animal hospital and shelter in Udaipur, India. He has also set up a charitable remainder trust and put his remaining Time Warner stock in it. The trust essentially pays him a 5 percent annuity on the amount, and when he and his wife die the money will go to the family foundation. "I would suggest that since he has a little more time that he might consider sitting down with the family and framing how they could make their giving more impactful," Ms. Jacquet said. "If animal welfare is important to them, do they want to have some permanent funding for rescuing animals that are at risk? Is there something they could really do that would be their family legacy?" Mr. Brack said a mission statement was something his family talked about often. They have an out of date one. "When something comes up like Haiti or Japan, we say we want to help out, too," he said. Still, Mr. Brack is better off than many retired executives. He has avoided the major pitfall (after divorce) that befalls many successful executives not understanding the need for liquid assets and the cash flow necessary to maintain their lifestyles. "My motto is kids first, charity second," he said. "Our goal is to continue to be able to do the things that are important to us."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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Ford is recalling nearly 386,000 Escape sport utility vehicles from the 2001 4 model years because a corrosion problem could result in a loss of steering. The company is also recalling 49,000 vehicles from the 2013 14 model years because the seat backs are not strong enough, the automaker said in a news release on Friday. Ford said corrosion of the Escapes' subframe "may cause the lower control arm to separate, potentially resulting in diminished steering control." The company said it knew of one accident related to the problem, although there were no injuries associated with it. Ford is recalling vehicles only in states that use a lot of salt on their roads during the winter, however, saying that those places are where the problem is most likely to occur. The carmaker's action is known as a regional recall, and for years, consumer advocates have said that this type of recall allows automakers to save money but may miss unsafe vehicles in other states. But the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has approved such recalls and, along with auto manufacturers, defended them as practical and safe.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Lucie Pohl proves to be a delightful raconteur in "Hi, Hitler," her one woman show at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Her story, though, ultimately is less engaging than she is, growing more amorphous as it goes along and slowing to a stop rather than reaching a peak. Ms. Pohl, directed by Kenneth Ferrone, tells an autobiographical tale about her eccentric family and her lifelong sense of not quite fitting in. The title comes from her childhood fascination with Hitler (Ms. Pohl is in her mid 30s) and her innocent mishearing of "Heil Hitler" she thought it was a cheery greeting, an especially unfortunate misapprehension because her household was Jewish. It's a funny anecdote, but the thread disappears more quickly than the titular treatment would suggest. Its real purpose is to establish the anchor points for Ms. Pohl's life. She was born in Germany but was brought to New York as a child when her parents relocated. She returned to Germany when she was older to study acting and to work but is now back in New York. The theme of identity runs through her series of anecdotes, many of which involve her colorful family.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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THE Volkswagen Golf was introduced in 1974, effectively replacing the original people's car, the Beetle. Now, 40 years later, Golf is not as beloved (there's no reboot of "The Love Bug" with a Golf as Herbie, is there?), but this seventh generation hatchback deserves immense respect. It has won nearly every award, including North American Car of the Year and World Car of the Year. Named after the wind Americans would spell "gulf" (not the sport) it's all the car most of us need. Make that cars, because the Golf has plenty of powertrain choices that transform it. There is the all electric e Golf, an incredibly fuel efficient TDI diesel, the high performance GTI and an even more potent all wheel drive R model. A two door 5 speed manual Golf starts at 18,815 with destination, and various models can please all but the luxury buyer. Most will choose the TSI that, fully loaded with an excellent 900 lighting package, comes in just under 30,000. If that seems expensive, the Golf has that intangible German feel, very comfortable, quiet and refined, which gives the model value. TSI gets its scoot from a velvety smooth 1.8 liter turbocharged 4 cylinder engine, producing 170 horsepower and 200 pound feet of torque low in the power band, with the dash to 60 in just under eight seconds. A 6 speed automatic is standard in the top line SEL model that I drove. No, it's not the lovely dual clutch unit in the GTI, but there are paddle shifters.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Natelege Whaley, a freelance journalist, said: "No one is really thinking about whether Black freelancers have the resources they need to stay sane during this time." Heat flushed Natelege Whaley's body as she wrote a news article about the shooting by police that killed Breonna Taylor. Ms. Whaley, a journalist, figured she was tired. Then came the mental fog, digestive issues and blurred vision. When these seemingly separate issues snowballed into a panic attack and a trip to the emergency room in late May, Ms. Whaley, 31, who lives in Brooklyn, connected the dots. "I'm writing about the suffering of someone who looks like me," she said. "We just keep going and going and going and going because we feel like that's what we must do, and that's not healthy." The news today is filled with grief, especially for Black journalists reporting on violence against Black people, socioeconomic disparities underscored by the coronavirus pandemic and racism in the workplace. The situation is complicated by the fact that often they are doing this work for publications where most of the staff is white. "Black journalists, like nurses or psychotherapists or anyone else who regularly hears or views trauma narratives, may experience vicarious trauma, or distress that stems from repeated exposure to the trauma of others," said Robin D. Stone, a licensed mental health counselor specializing in trauma informed treatment. "They may feel especially vulnerable that the person on the respirator or in the violent video could be them or someone they love." (Ms. Stone knows the world of reporting intimately: For more than 20 years, she was a journalist, including a stint at The New York Times.) The conditions can be particularly challenging for freelancers, who cannot rely on a biweekly paycheck or corporate health insurance, Ms. Whaley said. "Even though you're getting paid, it really puts us in a vulnerable position while the company profits off the work that requires immense emotional and mental labor," she said. "Yes, the stories need to be told. But no one is really thinking about whether Black freelancers have the resources they need to stay sane during this time." Black Americans are underrepresented in American newsrooms; a Pew Research Center survey of data from 2013 to 2017 found that only 7 percent of newsroom employees are Black. (At The New York Times, 9 percent of newsroom employees are Black.) Often Black journalists are called upon to report and write specifically about issues within their own community, which may involve viewing imagery that depicts violence, hatred and death. Many of them have begun speaking out about the importance of prioritizing mental health care and wellness. In the absence of employer sponsored insurance and mental health services for freelancers, and in light of recent discussions on workplace burnout, many Black journalists are rethinking the work that is required to report on atrocities in Black communities. "I feel like we're still figuring it out," Ms. Whaley said. "We're just starting to have these open conversations about mental health because in the past Black journalists were just supposed to be happy just to be in this space, especially if you have a job at a major publication. It's like everyone thinks that you've made it." Inundated with a nonstop stream of race related news, today's Black journalists are adopting a mix of traditional and informal practices to better care for and protect their own mental health and wellness. "All Black Americans have some degree of PTSD," said Dr. Monnica Williams, a clinical psychologist and expert in race based stress and trauma. In the case of Black journalists, Dr. Williams referred to studies of being "repeatedly exposed to details of traumatic experiences in your line of work." "Being a journalist is not any different because you're being constantly exposed to these gruesome details of horrific instances of racism," she said. "So it's just the same." To better manage on a day to day basis, Dr. Williams recommended a "toolbox of coping strategies" that includes seeking social support within one's communities, briefly limiting one's exposure to cues of racism, engaging with religious or spiritual practices, seeking distraction from cues of racism, and participating in restful and relaxing activities. And how does one determine if and when they should take a break? Dr. Williams pointed to several examples of racial stress and trauma interfering with one's daily functions, like being depressed or anxious for most of the day, or having trouble sleeping. But sometimes taking a break from writing means cutting off one's main source of income, especially without the support of paid sick days or paid time off. Ms. Whaley proposed offering Black journalists fully funded sabbaticals every to rest, recover and reset: "That would be a real reparation to me because we need it." "I want all Black journalists to know you deserve so much better," she continued. "And I deserved better than what I gave myself and what this industry has given me." Julia Craven, 27, a reporter for Slate in Washington, D.C., has been reporting exclusively on racism since graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014. Two years into her career, the news cycle flooded with reports of hate crimes and white supremacist ideologies, fueled in part by the 2016 presidential election. There were also numerous stories of Black individuals who had been killed in police custody. Ms. Craven felt she could barely tread water. In each killed person, she would catch a glimpse of her loved ones: her brother, her boyfriend, her best friend, her sister and sometimes even herself. "Everything seemed like it was constantly happening, so I went back into therapy," Ms. Craven said. "I knew that I needed to develop some sort of self care system because if my mental health ain't on point, then I can't do my job." More recently, at her therapist's suggestion, Ms. Craven has made a concerted effort to limit her exposure to the news on the weekends. The move has given her the space and time to focus on herself on days off and be more present when she is at work, particularly at a demanding time. Dr. Williams said she frequently advises her Black clients, friends and even acquaintances to unplug from social media to recover from stress and recommends they not watch videos of Black people being harmed. "I don't think journalists need to see these videos unless your job is to write a detailed account of how the person died, second by second," she said. But therapy and an escape from the news is a luxury to many, especially uninsured and freelance journalists, like Ms. Whaley. She said she tried seeing a therapist, but her funds were limited given her uneven employment and the cost of an in network therapist through her health insurance. "I couldn't afford the therapy because I'm a freelancer and not a full time staff writer with benefits," she said. "But then I need to go to therapy to help cope with my freelance career." Sonia Weiser, 28, a white freelance writer based in Manhattan, started the relief fund through a GoFundMe page after witnessing an outpouring of calls for Black writers to cover racial violence, as well as the protests galvanized by the killing of George Floyd, often for relatively little compensation. "It just felt rude and disrespectful to put the onus on Black journalists, especially when so much of the trauma incurred in the industry is because of white employers," she said. After she created the fund, people donated to meet the 20,000 goal and raised 32,000 within 48 hours. Ms. Weiser has since raised over 70,000, and has partnered with the International Women's Media Foundation for additional support. They have provided microgrants to 84 applicants (the majority of whom don't have health insurance that covers mental health expenses), matching nearly every person's desired amount up to 2,000. As one of the fund recipients, Ms. Whaley has received enough money to see a therapist a Black woman, which was Ms. Whaley's preference twice a week for the next four to six months. (She sought more affordable psychotherapy sessions through Open Path Collective, a nonprofit organization providing affordable, in office and online psychotherapy services ranging from 30 to 80 per session.) "I was able to take a deep breath after that," Ms. Whaley said. While Ms. Stone recommends a therapist if trauma or stress related symptoms are interfering with a person's work or home life, she said she also encourages Black journalists to cultivate a world outside of work and to seek support through communities of peers with whom they can share their experiences and find common ground and validation. Clydeen McDonald, 33, a freelance journalist from Trinidad and Tobago, said he had been despondent over his work, especially after two high profile, historically white staffed national publications passed on his pitches about coronavirus related news in the Caribbean region. Charlie Brinkhurst Cuff, 27, the head of editorial at gal dem magazine, a British publication that centers perspectives of women and nonbinary people of color, said for a while, she chose to prioritize her work "ahead of personal concerns." She noticed her stress levels were at an all time high, underscored by a monthlong eye twitch. She felt anguish about her decision, recently, to take a week off. "We've been doing this work, this anti racist kind of reporting, for years now," she said. "I've never seen this level of interest in what we do and how we do it. It's been intense. It's been very draining. This period of time and this increased level of interest won't last, and I kind of want to make the most out of it while people care."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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EMPIRES OF THE SKY Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men's Epic Duel to Rule the World By Alexander Rose Let us now stop and pay homage to the airship, the dirigible, the zeppelin the great flying machine that is best remembered, if it's remembered at all, for its greatest failure: the explosion of the Hindenburg in Lakehurst, N.J., in May 1937. Most people, even children thanks to a proliferation of juvenile books on this subject know the hazy outlines of that story. All that inflammable hydrogen gas. All those people on board. The unexpected crash just before landing and the famous eyewitness report of the carnage. "Oh, the humanity!" Alexander Rose, the author of several books including "Men of War," says his interest in this topic began there, starting with a simple question: "Hey, what about a book about the Hindenburg?" But to say that Rose's new book, "Empires of the Sky," is about the Hindenburg is to diminish the genius of the narrative Rose has crafted here. Instead of writing about a single moment in time May 6, 1937 Rose has built a sweeping narrative, taking us all the way back to the 1800s, to the days of "aeronauts" and "balloonmania," to the early dreams of flying and to the central question that loomed over aviation from the late 1890s all the way to the 1930s and the Hindenburg explosion. That question wasn't whether or not we could fly. Early efforts showed that it was possible for anyone willing to risk dying in a crippling crunch of wood, aluminum, fabric and fuel. The question, instead, soon became this: If we are to fly if we are to truly travel in the sky will it be by airplane or will it be by airship? It's an unthinkable question today. When, besides football games, was the last time you even saw a blimp? But the question, and the heated rivalry it created between the airplane and the airship builders, form the heart of the action in "Empires of the Sky," pitting the two sides against each other in a quest for aerial domination at a time when no one knew how it would end. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. On the one side, there's Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the quixotic German aristocrat whose name would become synonymous with the airship, and his anointed heir, Hugo Eckener, a tireless true believer in the notion that hydrogen filled zeppelins were the only way to fly. And on the other side, there are the Wright brothers and Juan Trippe, the power hungry, Yale educated executive who, in the 1920s and '30s, a generation after the Wright brothers' early successes, would try to make money off airplanes at his fledgling company: Pan American Airlines. In a sign of just how far reaching the narrative will be, the book opens in the summer of 1863, with the Civil War raging in America and a young Count von Zeppelin traveling through the wilderness in the newly minted state of Minnesota. The privileged count was vagabonding across America when he met up with a balloonist in the streets of St. Paul and did what privileged counts are wont to do: He wheedled himself a ride. Air travel is so commonplace today (or it was, at least, before coronavirus restrictions) that it's hard to imagine how flights like these changed the world. But they did. From the air, people felt untethered from the earth; many spoke about their experiences in over the top, rapturous tones. "From now on our place is the sky!" said one man in Rose's narrative after an early balloon flight. "Such utter calm. Such immensity! Such an astonishing view." Zeppelin felt similarly, and the early chapters of "Empires of the Sky" document his efforts to build what the French called a dirigeable a "steerable" balloon. It did not go well, at first. In the 1890s, the esteemed count was, frankly, a joke. "As he walked down the streets of Stuttgart," Rose writes, "Zeppelin was ridiculed and taunted as a lunatic." But in July 1900 three years before the Wright brothers would fly Zeppelin soared for almost 18 minutes over Germany in a 420 foot airship filled with nearly 400,000 cubic feet of hydrogen. He quickly built other, better models. By 1908, Germans routinely turned their heads to the sky, shouting, "Zeppelin kommt!," and even when the count crashed and crashed badly, people loved him. There was, Rose notes, Zeppelin beer, cheese, suspenders, boot polish and cigars. Without question, at this point the airship not the airplane was the future, and many experts still believed that after Zeppelin's death (of natural causes) in 1917. Eckener Zeppelin's disciple, "as German as one can be," and the true protagonist in this narrative would reel off a string of successes to prove it. Zeppelins, not airplanes, were the first to offer passenger flights in Europe and the first to transport passengers across the Atlantic Ocean, connecting to both North and South America. And the bullet shaped ships were always intriguing to the military. Even the Americans briefly commissioned airships in hopes of winning the heavens all of which is recounted in "Empires of the Sky" with mounting tension, building to the climax of the Hindenburg. It was to be the Zeppelin company's greatest ship "the pinnacle of German engineering, German technique, German air power and German prowess." But by then, Eckener had three major problems: Juan Trippe; fast improving airplanes; and Adolf Hitler, who had little love for Eckener but viewed his zeppelins as yet another way to prove German superiority. While Hitler, to Eckener's horror, slapped enormous swastikas on the tail fins of the Hindenburg, Trippe was looking to take everything that Eckener had, his trans Atlantic service most of all. "We will be going across the Atlantic and, after that, across the Pacific," Trippe promised. "We are going around the world." The characters are fascinating you'll recognize their names. Roosevelt, Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Lindbergh are all here. They mingle together in smoke filled rooms with Eckener, while passengers on nascent airlines toss cigarettes out their windows, dine off porcelain plates, wipe their lips with linen napkins and then stroll through new Art Deco airport terminals. The history here is fascinating, too. Why did zeppelins use hydrogen instead of helium, the American airship gas of choice? Rose answers that. And what caused the Hindenburg to crash? Rose answers that, too, taking on and debunking all the many conspiracy theories, without veering too far from his narrative. But at times, the prose wanders into cliches. Characters bite off more than they can chew, twiddle their thumbs, cool their heels, have albatrosses around their necks and are as pleased as punch. And early on, the narrative feels a bit like one of Eckener's 800 foot airships. It lumbers just a bit on takeoff, taking 200 pages just to get through World War I and introduce Trippe. Over all, however, the reader will be glad for staying with Rose. We need to know about Zeppelin's early failures because, at its heart, this book isn't about a rivalry. It is a love letter to the airship. And even though we know how the story ends with the airplane winning our business, and the Hindenburg going down in flames and Eckener disappearing from our collective imagination I read with great urgency all the way to the final page, captivated by what might have been and marveling at what humans can accomplish with the help of engineering, physics, facts. That's a lesson that's only all too relevant today. But it's all just subtext here. Rose could not have known the world in which this book would fly. And so, we should just appreciate "Empires of the Sky" for what it is: important history and a true narrative a definitive tale of an incredible time when mere mortals learned to fly.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Ivy Kirzhner New York, a shoe designer, expected to open in early fall, has taken a 10 year lease for an 800 square foot space for its flagship shop in this four story, mixed use corner brick townhouse in the Greenwich Village Historic District, built around 1920. The space has 50 feet of wraparound frontage, a full basement and 10 foot ceilings, and sits across the street from the Spotted Pig restaurant.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Poisonings from a toxin carried by barracuda and other sport fish have been seriously underestimated in Florida, according to a new study and the problem is far more common in fishing communities around the world than has been recognized, the lead author said. In Florida, poisonings from the ciguatera toxin were highest among Hispanics, presumably because they are more fond of eating barracuda, according to the study, which was published this week in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Ciguatera (pronounced sig WAH terra) is produced by algae that grow in warm water, and there is a risk of it spreading north as ocean waters warm, said Elizabeth G. Radke, an epidemiologist at the University of Florida's Emerging Pathogens Institute and the lead author of the study. The poison is picked up by coral reef fish that eat vegetation and concentrates in larger carnivorous fish that eat them. The highest levels are found in barracuda, but it is also found in grouper, amberjack, hogfish, snapper, mackerel and mahi mahi. Neither cooking nor freezing affects the toxin.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Two years ago, objecting to a large pending rent increase for their one bedroom TriBeCa apartment, Marianne and Erik Jansen moved to Dumbo, Brooklyn. For a one bedroom in a former factory building, they paid 3,900 a month, slightly less than their TriBeCa rent would have been. They didn't realize how inconvenient they would find Dumbo. They wanted a neighborhood with more restaurants and food stores. "There's nothing there," Mr. Jansen said. "In Dumbo, everything is somewhere else. Even though I could throw a rock from my apartment to my office" he was working in the financial district at the time "the commute was horrendous." The Jansens, who both work in advertising and were married two years ago, had been hunting sporadically for a place to buy. Their situation was "probably pretty typical," Mr. Jansen said. "Every now and then, I got a bee in my bonnet and started looking around. You realize you can afford only a tiny little shoe box, and you get depressed and stop looking." They contacted Jennifer Roberts, an associate broker at Halstead Property, a former colleague of Ms. Jansen's. Their aim was a two bedroom for less than 1 million. The couple wanted to make sure they were well prepared to buy. "After looking over their financials," Ms. Roberts said, "we concluded they could actually consider condos right away." The Jansens felt that downtown's high prices left little room for appreciation in value. They liked the quaintness of the Upper West Side's prewar buildings until they learned that in their price range, quaint could mean small with poor light and little closet space. A new building seemed a better bet. "What a new building lacked in character or charm, I could make up for in nice decorations or paintings on the wall," Mr. Jansen said. A year ago, they went to dinner with friends who had moved to Harlem. Their friends gushed about their neighborhood, so the Jansens visited "to see it in person, as opposed to just on paper," Ms. Jansen said. They loved it. "There is a real sense of community in Harlem, and it really feels like a neighborhood," she said. They felt values there would only rise. In Harlem, they ran into some high prices. Both liked the Strathmore, a 1920 building near West 115th Street that was being converted from a rental to a condo. A two bedroom there was 829,000, with monthly charges in the mid 800s. But too much of its 1,100 square feet was taken up by a long hallway. The couple preferred the building's three bedroom apartments, but those were around 1.1 million or more. Ms. Jansen objected to the window air conditioning units. At that point, they were also concerned about living in a construction zone. The Fitzgerald, on West 117th Street, had no such drawbacks. The 1892 building, converted to a condominium in 2007, was on a side street in an even more convenient location, just half a block from bustling Frederick Douglass Boulevard. There, they saw a place advertised as a one bedroom with a windowless home office ("serves as a perfect two bedroom") for 825,000, with monthly charges of around 700. The apartment had 960 square feet, but "this was all usable, maximized space," Ms. Jansen said. They offered the asking price and signed a contract. But the apartment was appraised for 750,000. "The appraiser was comparing it to a one bedroom, and wasn't taking into account the home office," Ms. Roberts said. The Jansens, worried that they were overpaying, thought they might not be able to finance the apartment. They scheduled a second appraisal. Meanwhile, Ms. Roberts told them about something new. Apartments at the Adeline, under construction on West 116th Street, were just coming on the market. The couple decided to visit the sales office, where they pored over floor plans. They liked what they saw. A two bedroom at the Adeline, with 1,100 square feet, would be larger than the Fitzgerald apartment and would have more closet space. The couple chose an apartment in the back of the building to avoid traffic noise. The price was 900,000, plus 12,500 for a basement storage bin. Monthly charges are in the mid 700s. Because their offer at the Fitzgerald had a mortgage contingency, they were able to easily walk away. (The second appraisal came in at 820,000.) Buying off floor plans wasn't a problem, Mr. Jansen said. It let them dream. But they did have to wait. To avoid being locked into a second year in Dumbo, they moved when their lease expired and rented a temporary place downtown. The Adeline missed its projected opening date by a few months, but the Jansens were able to close and move in this past winter.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Over five days at the Museum of Modern Art, beginning last Wednesday, visitors were greeted with a dance. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's "Work/Travail/Arbeid" spiraled around and around the wide open Marron Atrium for six hours a day (eight on Friday), performed by seven dancers from her estimable Brussels based troupe, Rosas, and seven musicians from the contemporary music ensemble Ictus. "Work" has appeared at museums in London, Brussels and Paris, and each affords an array of viewing options. MoMA's architecture allowed for a bird's eye view of the choreography, which unspools in relation to a blossoming pattern of circles, drawn in chalk on the floor. I spent an hour watching from a sixth floor balcony, taking in the big geometric picture, and another hour in the atrium, on the dancers' level, close enough to see beads of sweat hit the ground. An expansion of Ms. De Keersmaeker's "Vortex Temporum" a 65 minute piece created for the stage and set to Gerard Grisey's score of the same name "Work" springs from an arrestingly simple vocabulary of walking, skipping and running. Precise but not excessively polished, as disciplined as it is carefree, it has the exploratory energy of a rehearsal, of dancers problem solving rather than displaying what they already know. Ms. De Keersmaeker has noted that the performance hours coincide with her company's usual work day, and "Work" reads almost like a private daily practice made public. Given the sheer volume of visitors to MoMA and Ms. De Keersmaeker's loyal New York following "Work" attracted the large audience it deserves. But in smaller, quieter spaces last week, two younger choreographers were also exploring the work of dancing and of living a life grounded in dance. At the Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City, Queens, Ursula Eagly offered "Piece With Gaps for Each Other," while Aynsley Vandenbroucke unveiled "And" at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Credit...Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times DUBLIN Craig Dwyer recently sat in an office above a convenience store in downtown Dublin, scrolling through a database he had compiled of hundreds of online ads that have popped up about Ireland's abortion referendum on Friday. Mr. Dwyer, who co founded an election transparency group, pulled up one anti abortion YouTube video that had only a few views when it was posted last year. After the video was republished as a referendum campaign ad on Facebook by a group from an unknown location, it attracted more than 1.2 million views, he said. He also showed an anti abortion ad on Facebook that purported to be from an unbiased organization, but was also purchased by a buyer who couldn't be traced. With such ads on the rise, Facebook and Google took aggressive steps this month to prevent foreign meddling ahead of Ireland's vote. Facebook blocked ads related to the abortion campaign from groups outside Ireland, while Google banned all referendum related spots altogether. Ireland has turned into a test case of whether Facebook and Google can thwart foreign groups from influencing elections, and misinformation from spreading. For months leading to Friday's vote on whether to lift a constitutional ban on abortion, online ads on the issue became increasingly common from international groups attempting to sway the outcome. Of the 280 groups that since February had bought ads on Facebook tied to the abortion vote, 14 percent were based outside the country or in an untraceable location, according to Mr. Dwyer's group. How Facebook and Google have responded to these ads is being closely scrutinized because it foreshadows what the companies may try in the United States and elsewhere to keep elections unsullied. Both companies want to show they have improved since the 2016 American presidential election, when Russian agents manipulated Google's YouTube and Facebook to spread divisive messages to voters. On Thursday, Facebook and Twitter rolled out new election transparency efforts. Critics warn that if Facebook and Google cannot minimize their negative influence in a country the size of Ireland, which has a population of 4.8 million, far bigger challenges will loom with the midterm elections in the United States this November. Even so, the effectiveness of the companies' actions in Ireland has not been clear cut and it may take months, if not years, to know whether any disinformation campaigns broke through their efforts. That's especially so since ads are only one part of a larger misinformation problem that also includes organic posts. Mr. Dwyer said Facebook's ban of abortion ads financed by foreign groups had reduced such ads on the social network. Yet abortion ads from international groups continued to make their way online through other digital platforms, and campaign materials were still being posted and shared on Facebook by users, he said. "The broader question is what information is flowing through the system and how much of that information is pollution and what is not," said Gavin Sheridan, a co founder of the online news outlet Storyful, who tracked foreign ad spending for the Irish vote. "We can't really know." Niamh Sweeney, Facebook's head of public policy for Ireland, said the company blocked foreign political ads on May 8 after finding some worrisome activity. In one instance, she said, the company found a foreign group paying to increase the visibility of Facebook posts created by Irish campaigners. That violated the spirit of Irish law that bans international campaign contributions. Facebook declined to identify the groups involved. "This isn't a small thing to do, but we felt it was the right move to make," Ms. Sweeney said, adding that Facebook's team in Ireland recommended the action to the company's Silicon Valley leadership. Google, which banned all referendum related ads in Ireland on May 9, declined to comment. The company said in a statement this month that it had stopped running the ads to protect the "integrity" of the vote. The Irish government committed in January to holding a referendum on whether to repeal a 35 year old constitutional ban known as the Eighth Amendment on abortion. If a majority of voters approve the repeal, the amendment would be replaced with a new clause stating the Irish Parliament has the power to make laws regulating abortion. Since then, the issue has been hotly debated, with campaign placards taking over downtown Dublin and the referendum dominating conversation. The vote's outcome appears too close to call. Mr. Dwyer said he began noticing the flood of online abortion ads almost immediately after starting the Transparent Referendum Initiative in February. The ads came from groups with names like Women Betrayed by Abortion, Chicago for Repeal and Eighth Debate. In one ad that Mr. Dwyer traced as coming from a British religious organization, the message read: "Don't allow more children to be lost to legalized abortion." Another Facebook ad, posted by a group from an untraceable location, showed the image of a fetus in a toilet. The pileup of such ads helped lead to Facebook's blockage of political advertising from groups based outside Ireland. In addition, the company introduced a transparency tool so people can see all the ads an organization is airing across the site. Facebook also deployed an artificial intelligence system developed after the 2016 United States presidential campaign to spot foreign ads. The system flags ads that are suspected of coming from outside Ireland by analyzing billing information, where a website originated, what kind of ad targeting specifications are used, and if the ad host is using a virtual private network to hide where it is based. The system will play a critical role in the company's future election efforts. Ms. Sweeney said it was still improving and occasionally produced false positives and other inaccuracies. While many Irish are split on the abortion vote, they have been united in their criticism of Facebook's and Google's roles in the referendum. "Facebook and Google are deciding what to do with our referendum," said Mr. Sheridan, the chief executive of Vizlegal, a maker of legal software, who supports lifting the abortion ban. Mr. Sheridan is part of a volunteer army that uncovered suspicious ads coming from groups outside Ireland. "We didn't elect Mark Zuckerberg to make decisions about how our referendum should be run," he said, referring to Facebook's chief executive. "We need to know who is running the ads and who's paying for the ads," said James Lawless, the legislator who sponsored the bill. Facebook said it supported the Irish bill. Google declined to comment. Mr. Dwyer said governments globally must set stricter rules around disclosures of online campaign ads so voters knew who was paying for the material showing up in their Facebook feeds, in their Google search results and on YouTube. "Ireland is definitely not unique," he said. "No country has cracked this."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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The Scottish crime writer, whose new book is "Conviction," is drawn to "flawed characters asking big questions and taking action. ... That said, I will read, literally, anything." What books are on your nightstand? "The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper," by Hallie Rubenhold; Peter Mansfield's "A History of the Middle East"; "The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography," by Aleister Crowley; Michael Ondaatje's "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid"; Paul Johnson's "A History of the Jews"; "The Ghosts of K2," by Mick Conefrey. Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how). In my office armchair during winter, next to the fire, with a pint of strong tea, nicotine substitutes and a packet of biscuits. The chair is red pleather, cracked on the seat and mended with silver gaffer tape. It is the perfect shape for book slouching. The room faces north so that during the day a soft, gray light from the window comes over my shoulder to the page. It's hard to read when I'm writing and brilliant books pile up on my desk. When I get stuck or discouraged I'll treat myself to a few days read bingeing. What's your favorite book of all time? "Heart of a Dog," by Bulgakov, because of the politics, the humor and the cat strangling. Also Bulgakov's back story: I have a major crush on Bulgakov. Which books got you hooked on crime fiction? "Therese Raquin," by Emile Zola; "Falling Angel," by William Hjortsberg; and "The Blunderer," by Patricia Highsmith. Who's your favorite fictional detective? And the best villain? Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Graham Greene said the writer has to be aware of the question in the reader's mind, the pending question. The best mysteries play with that, answering, deflecting, teasing, taking the reader off on a tangent that ends up answering the question and posing another, bigger one. If it starts on the first page and does this, it makes for an incredibly satisfying read. A lot of books don't start on the first page and I find that annoying. In my own writing I've culled killer pages because they weren't the start of the story, and I'm jealous of writers who don't. What kinds of stories are you drawn to? And what do you steer clear of? Ideally, I'm drawn to flawed characters asking big questions and taking action. These don't sound like a particularly onerous criterion but they are. That said, I will read, literally, anything. I once read "Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter," by Simone de Beauvoir, three times in a row, because I was abroad and couldn't find any other books in English. What books would you recommend to someone who wants to know more about Scotland? "Poverty Safari," by Darren McGarvey; "Black and Blue," by Ian Rankin; "The Trick Is to Keep Breathing," by Janice Galloway; and anything by the historians Tom Devine or John Prebble. What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves? A lot of dry books about the American Civil War. I know that an obsession with the Civil War is a common symptom of middle age in America, but here it's considered a baffling preoccupation. A 2013 exhibition of Civil War photography at the Met sparked my interest, but I have no idea why this subject is so compelling. I have no one to talk to about it or get recommendations from so the span of books is wide and chaotic. Who is your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer? I don't know if she is overlooked, I suspect not, but I think Jane Gardam is a genius and should be far more widely read. She has actually made me gasp, slap a book shut and say, "She can't do that!," open it up and realize that she can, she has, and it works. I suspect that she isn't mentioned much because she writes almost exclusively about unfashionable subjects and doesn't perform the social role of genius no fedora or pipe or dreary public spats with other writers. She's just a quiet genius. Also Tessa Hadley is wonderful. I'd love to steal from her but I can't because her work is so clean and pared and unique. What kind of reader were you as a child? Obligation reader. I couldn't read until I was about 9 and then I didn't want to. I only developed a passion for reading when I was about 19. Scout from "To Kill a Mockingbird." Like a lot of children who go on to study law, I had an oversensitivity to injustice and relished feeling sanctimonious. As an adult I basically married Atticus. What's the last book you recommended to a member of your family? "Say Nothing," by Patrick Radden Keefe. It's a history of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Our grandfather came over from Keady in Armagh before partition but attitudes to the Troubles vary widely within our extended family. Keefe manages to be an unflinching historian while wrapping it up in a compelling thriller style narrative arc. I loved it because he talks about the "moral injury" to those on both sides, the damage done to the individuals who participated and the problematic lack of any South African style truth and reconciliation projects afterward. Brexit has highlighted how little people in the United Kingdom know or care about what happened in Ireland. I'd foist this book on anyone. What's the best book you ever received as a gift? "One Hundred Years of Solitude." I was 19 and didn't read much and had mistakenly gone on what turned out to be a "Girls Gone Wild" style holiday in Greece. We all fell out with each other quite badly and one of them gave it to me. I found the holiday so depressing that I started reading obsessively. It began my lifelong love affair with reading as an escape, which is the very purest kind of reading. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? "The Psychopath Test," by Jon Ronson. Whatever your politics, that boy's not right. What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn't? "Pride and Prejudice." I have a morbid horror of marriage. I can appreciate the writing and subtlety, but redemption through marriage books read like horror stories to me. I just want Elizabeth to run off to sea. Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? "Mr. Norris Changes Trains," by Christopher Isherwood. I recently read "Goodbye to Berlin" while in Berlin, ran out to buy "Mr. Norris" when I got back, and then realized it wasn't quite as good, had less Sally Bowles and a looser structure. Also I was no longer in Berlin. I will finish it but it didn't command my attention in the same way. If you were to write something besides mysteries, what would you write? I'm currently adapting Brecht's "Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti" for a joint production between the Royal Lyceum and Glasgow's Citizen's Theater with DOT Theater Istanbul's Murat Daltaban. DOT and the Lyceum did an amazing production of Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" a few years ago and I'm incredibly lucky to be working with them. In my career I have written comics, plays, TV scripts and journalism, but mystery novels and prose are my true loves. Getting back to them after doing another project always feels like coming home. Whom would you choose to write your life story? An infinite number of monkeys. So much has happened and I come from an enormous Catholic family, a lot of us are lawyers, so every single truth is contested. There are a hundred versions of every story and it would take a thought experiment to accidentally hit on the abstract truth of any of it. You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? The older I get the less I enjoy dinner parties. It's a stiff kind of theater, the gathering, the exclamations of delight over the food, the relentless self presentation: "i'M a wRitEr, aCtuaLly!" In fairness, I have been to a lot of them and may have blown out my taste buds with cigarettes. It feels like I'm eating dust for three hours while wearing tight pants. In Andrew Wilson's wonderful biography of Highsmith there's a story about her girlfriend trying to introduce a socially isolated Highsmith to a group of interesting new friends over a dinner. During a conversational lull Highsmith stood up, leaned forward to a candle and set fire to her own hair to get out of it. She didn't much like them either. What book do you think everybody should read before they die? I find this almost impossible to answer because no book is right for everybody. Reading is a collaboration between a reader and writer and the reading experience is contingent on the prism the reader brings to it. Flaubert said every single reading produces a different book. In conclusion: "Fifty Shades of Grey." What do you plan to read next? "The Five." I'm going to read it right now. The fire is on, phone is off, I have biscuits and three hours of nothing else to do.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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YouTube on Monday admitted that its family friendly restricted mode had wrongly labeled some videos on its site. The company apologized and promised to fix the error after users complained that the site was filtering some videos about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. "The bottom line is that this feature isn't working the way it should," Johanna Wright, vice president for product management, said in a blog post Monday evening. "We're sorry and we're going to fix it." YouTube was pressed over the weekend by some of its biggest stars to address the issue, and the statement on Monday evening appeared to go further to address some of the complaints than a pair of previous statements, released on Sunday and Monday afternoon. Calum McSwiggan, who makes videos about gay rights and other issues, was among those who asked YouTube to address the problem over the weekend. On Monday night, he said on Twitter that he was "really happy" with the response from the company, which specifically mentioned one of his blocked videos in its statement. In its statement on Sunday, YouTube said that many videos featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender content were unaffected by the filter, an optional parental control mode, and that it targeted only those that discussed delicate topics such as politics, health and sexuality. But some video creators, including the musicians Tegan and Sara and Tyler Oakley, a YouTube personality and gay rights advocate, disagreed, pointing to blocked content that they argued was suitable for children of any age and did not discuss such subjects. They also said the filtering shielded lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender children from the resources and support the videos can provide. Still others questioned whether the filtering was even necessary. YouTube on Monday described restricted mode, which was introduced in 2010, as "an optional feature" for institutions like schools that now accounts for only about 1.5 percent of all daily views. "It will take time to fully audit our technology and roll out new changes, so please bear with us," Ms. Wright said on Monday. Restricted mode relies on "community flagging, age restrictions and other signals" to identify which videos to filter, according to an official description. The company has said the feature is not 100 percent accurate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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They're paying the STEM professor double what they're paying the liberal arts professor, because the marketplace says there's much more demand for those careers. I remember coming to New York in 1966 after Harvard Business School and I took philosophy and art appreciation at the New School. I did not have a good liberal arts education in high school or in college, but did it change my life? I don't know. The part that's most important in an education is how to deal with people. There's no job I know that you do by yourself, and I learned as much from the two guys I worked for at Salomon Brothers, Billy Salomon and John Gutfreund, as I'd learned at Harvard. In the end, it's people skills that you need. Whether you remember that Columbus arrived in 1492 or not a lot of the facts you memorize are immaterial. At Salomon, I was "demoted" as head of equity trading and sales to head the emerging computer systems area. If I hadn't gotten fired from Salomon, which became part of Citigroup, I wouldn't have gotten a 10 million severance, used my electrical engineering degree to begin my own information technology company and program a computer terminal for bond traders. I'd be working for my girlfriend now, who's on the board of Citibank! Who Gets the Job What disturbs me is you talk to kids applying today and they invariably say, "I cured cancer, I brought peace to the Mideast." Spare me. How about, "My father never existed, my mother is a convicted drug dealer. I worked three shifts at McDonald's." That's the kind of kid I want with an ethic of taking care of his family because then he'll take care of others. Some of us don't have much prenatal intelligence, but nevertheless go out and try and have a decent chance of surviving. I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but nobody's going to outwork me. Also, kids today brag about having had four or five jobs in the first few years. What a lot of people don't do is give it the old college try and stick with it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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Unassuming dragonfish lurk in the twilight zone, more than 1,600 feet under the surface of the ocean. Dark, eel like, and roughly three and a half inches long, these deep sea creatures glow with bioluminescence and have evolved a complex sensory system that allows them to detect even the subtlest movements in the ocean's shadowy realms, then attract and capture their prey. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Matter, scientists demonstrated another layer of complexity to the dragonfish: the thin, jagged teeth of the species Aristostomias scintillans are made of nanoscale size crystal particles. The composition and structure of these nanocrystals make the dragonfish's fangs transparent and stronger than the teeth of some of the fiercest fish predators, such as great white sharks and piranhas. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The new findings have intrigued both marine biologists and material scientists. Dragonfish aren't strong swimmers, so researchers have wondered how they eat. "They're basically hanging out in the water column," said Jacqueline Webb, a fish biologist at the University of Rhode Island. "Because they cannot be studied alive in the laboratory, any observation that can lend insights into the biology of these fishes is really valuable."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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