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More than a third of adults in the United States patronize fast food restaurants and pizza parlors on any given day. And the higher their income, the more likely they are to do so. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released data on fast food consumption gathered from 2013 to 2016 in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or Nhanes, a program that continuously monitors the health and nutritional status of Americans. The Nhanes analysis relies on physical examinations and in person interviews to produce demographic, socioeconomic and health data, including dietary information from a representative sample of about 10,000 adults over the four years. Fast food defined broadly in the survey as any item obtained from a "fast food/pizza" establishment is eaten by 37 percent of American adults at some point during the day.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
A capsule from Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft re entered Earth's atmosphere Saturday after being launched in 2014 to explore and collect samples from an asteroid named Ryugu. It landed and was recovered in the Australian outback. It should have come from northwest. OK, it is coming from the right side, and it's getting brighter and brighter. And the speed is very, very big. And it is coming through, near the zenith. OK, it has gone. No more lights in the sky. Re entry was made, and it was confirmed by everybody. Well, six years. Dec. 6: This story article been updated with additional information from the Japanese space agency following recovery of the capsule. This past weekend, Japan's space agency concluded a six year, 3.25 billion mile journey of discovery that aims to shed light on the earliest eons of the solar system and possibly provide clues about the origins of life on Earth. But first, it had to go on a scavenger hunt in the Australian outback. Bits of an asteroid landed in a barren region near Woomera, South Australia. These were being ferried to Earth by Hayabusa2, a robotic space probe launched by JAXA, Japan's space agency, in 2014 to explore an asteroid named Ryugu, a dark, carbon rich rock a bit more than half a mile wide. "I'm home," Yuichi Tsuda, the mission's project manager said in translated comments during a news conference after a capsule containing the asteroid sample was recovered. "Hayabusa2 is home." Dr. Tsuda described the condition of the capsule, which set down amid bushes in the Australian desert, as "very perfect." The success of the mission and the science it produces will raise Japan's status as a central player in deep space exploration, together with NASA, the European Space Agency and Russia. JAXA currently has a spacecraft in orbit around Venus studying that planet's hellish climate and is collaborating with the Europeans on a mission that is on its way to Mercury. In the coming years, Japan plans to bring back rocks from Phobos, a moon of Mars, and contribute to NASA's Artemis program to send astronauts to Earth's moon. But the immediate challenge was finding the 16 inch wide return capsule somewhere amid thousands of square miles in a region 280 miles north of Adelaide, the nearest large city. "It's really in the middle of nowhere," Shogo Tachibana, the principal investigator in charge of the analysis of the Hayabusa2 samples, said in an interview. He is part of a team of more than 70 people from Japan who traveled to Woomera for recovery of the capsule. The area, used by the Australian military for testing, provides a wide open space that was ideal for the return of an interplanetary probe. "I was very, very, very nervous and uneasy," Satoru Nakazawa, a project sub manager who was part of the Woomera recovery team, said during the news conference. But then, soon after sunrise, the capsule and its parachute were spotted. "We thought, wow, we found that," Mr. Nakazawa said. Even with the capsule in hand, there is a bit of a rush. The team wanted to whisk it back to Japan within 100 hours after the landing. Even though the container is sealed, the worry is that Earth air will slowly leak in. "There is no perfect sealing," Dr. Tachibana said. The helicopter took the capsule to a laboratory that has been set up at the Australian air force base at Woomera. There an instrument extracted gases within the capsule that may have been released by the asteroid rocks as they were shaken and broken during re entry. Makoto Yoshikawa, the mission manager, said in an interview the scientists would also like to see if they can detect any solar wind particles of helium that slammed into the asteroid and became embedded in the rocks. The gases would also reassure the scientists that Hayabusa2 did indeed successfully collect samples from Ryugu. A minimum of 0.1 grams, or less than 1/280th of an ounce, is needed to declare success. The hope is the spacecraft brought back several grams. On Monday night, an airplane left Australia to carry the sample back to Japan. There, the Hayabusa2 team will examine the Ryugu samples in earnest. In about a year, some of the samples will be shared with other scientists for additional study. To gather these samples, Hayabusa2 arrived at the asteroid in June 2018. It executed a series of investigations, each of escalating technical complexity. It dropped probes to the surface of Ryugu, blasted a hole in the asteroid to peer at what lies beneath and twice descended to the surface to grab small pieces of the asteroid, an operation that proved much more challenging than expected because of the many boulders on the surface. Small worlds like Ryugu used to be of little interest to planetary scientists who focused on studying planets, Masaki Fujimoto, deputy director general of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, part of JAXA, said in an interview. "Minor bodies, who cares?" he said. "But if you are serious about the formation of planetary systems, small bodies actually matter." Studying water trapped in minerals from Ryugu could give hints if the water in Earth's oceans came from asteroids, and if carbon based molecules could have seeded the building blocks for life. Part of the Ryugu samples will go to NASA, which is bringing back some rocks and soil from another asteroid with its OSIRIS REX mission. The OSIRIS REX space probe has been studying a smaller carbon rich asteroid named Bennu and it will start back to Earth next spring, dropping off its rock samples in September 2023. Ryugu and Bennu turned out to be surprisingly similar in some ways, both looking like spinning tops and with surfaces covered with boulders, but different in other ways. The rocks on Ryugu appear to contain much less water, for one. The significance of the similarities and differences will not become clear until after scientists study the rocks in more detail. "When the OSIRIS REX sample comes back, we will have lessons learned from the Hayabusa2 mission," said Harold C. Connolly Jr., a geology professor at Rowan University in New Jersey and the mission sample scientist for OSIRIS REX. "The similarities and differences are absolutely fascinating." Dr. Connolly hopes to go to Japan next summer to take part in analyzing the Ryugu samples. Hayabusa2 is not Japan's first planetary mission. Indeed, its name points to the existence of Hayabusa, an earlier mission that brought back samples from another asteroid, Itokawa. But that mission, which launched in 2003 and returned in 2010, faced major technical problems. So did JAXA's Akatsuki spacecraft, currently in orbit around Venus, which the Japanese agency managed to restore to a scientific mission after years of difficulty. A Japanese mission to Mars also failed in 2003. The team also had to navigate logistical hurdles because of the Covid 19 pandemic, quarantining for two weeks in a hotel in Adelaide before heading to Woomera. The Japanese missions generally operate on smaller budgets than NASA's and thus often carry fewer instruments. Hayabusa2's cost is less than 300 million while OSIRIS REX's price will run about 1 billion. Dropping off the Ryugu samples is not the end of the Hayabusa2 mission. After releasing the return capsule, the main spacecraft shifted course to avoid a collision with Earth, missing by 125 miles. It will now travel to another asteroid, a tiny one designated 1998 KY26 that is only 100 feet in diameter but spinning rapidly, completing one rotation in less than 11 minutes. Hayabusa2 will use two flybys of Earth to fling itself toward KY26, finally arriving in 2031. It will conduct some astronomical experiments during its extended deep space journey, and the spacecraft still carries one last projectile that it may use to test that space rock's surface.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. While President Trump has insisted that schools physically reopen, the private school his son Barron is attending is sticking with remote learning. Yes, that feels like a double standard, but it's more complicated than that. Barron will have a computer and internet access at home. He'll have adults making sure he does his work, and he'll be able to eat his fill without free school lunches. In short, affluent children will mostly be fine even without in person classes. But one study found that almost 17 million American children live in homes without high speed internet, and more than seven million don't have a computer at home. For disadvantaged kids, "online learning" is an oxymoron. Prolonged school closures will worsen dropout rates across the nation, for missing just 10 percent of class days is associated with a sevenfold increased risk of dropping out. Even in normal times, only 53 percent of children attending Bureau of Indian Education schools finish high school. Closures after Hurricane Katrina led many students to leave school for good. I fear that Trump's hyperbolic embrace of reopening schools has led Democrats to be instinctively wary. The risk is that in trying to protect students from the pandemic especially disadvantaged students we may permanently damage their futures. Let's sort through the evidence, which is inconsistent. It's false to assert, as Trump did, that children are "virtually immune" to the coronavirus, but the direct risk to schoolchildren is small. Those aged 5 through 14 account for fewer than one in every 1,000 Covid 19 deaths in the United States. Among all causes of death of children in that age group since February, the coronavirus was responsible less than 1 percent of the time. The greater risk is to elderly teachers and to students' grandparents, but advocates of reopening schools note that other countries have successfully operated schools. In most of those places, like Germany, Denmark, Norway and Taiwan, Covid 19 was relatively rare, but Sweden kept its schools open even though it has had a significantly higher per capita death toll than the United States. I've criticized Sweden's approach to the pandemic, which resulted in very high mortality and substantial economic damage, but it does offer a window into what happens when a country with elevated levels of Covid 19 keeps schools open. Sweden found no increased risk to teachers, compared with those in other jobs. One review article by a Swedish epidemiologist, Jonas Ludvigsson, concluded: "Children are unlikely to be the main drivers of the pandemic. Opening up schools and kindergartens is unlikely to impact Covid 19 mortality rates in older people." There's plenty of contrary evidence, however. A study in JAMA Pediatrics suggests that children may carry enough virus to spread the pandemic. The coronavirus raced through a sleepaway camp in Georgia so that 76 percent of campers and staff members for whom test results were available tested positive. Schools in at least five states reopened and then had to close again, at least temporarily, after eruptions of the virus a particular problem in parts of the country that did not take the pandemic seriously. Putting aside the health impact, we also know that low income children suffer disproportionately not only from the virus, but also from school closures. McKinsey has estimated that prolonged closures could cost students up to 14 months of education and lead to one million additional high school dropouts. The educational losses would reduce lifetime earnings of students by 80,000 each, with Black and Latino students suffering percentage drops in incomes twice as great as those among whites, McKinsey calculated. Given all this, the advice of the American Academy of Pediatrics seems right, that we do everything possible to allow children to safely resume in person learning. That's especially true for special needs students (about 14 percent of enrollment), as well as low income pupils and those at risk of dropping out. But this isn't about rashly herding children into schools, but about doing all that can be done to make schools safe. That means aggressive testing, mask wearing, open windows, outdoor classes when possible and grouping students in pods, and it will require much more federal assistance for schools. Let's also embrace Bandwidth for All, modeled on rural electrification in the 1930s and '40s. The internet is as essential today as electricity was then. There will be some places in the United States where coronavirus prevalence is so high that in person schooling will have to be suspended, but that should be the exception. It's absurd that we have allowed liquor stores, gyms, gun shops, restaurants and marijuana dispensaries to operate while keeping schools shut. Let's also remember that in a larger sense the best way to reopen schools is to demand responsibility from our leaders and all the rest of us. The path is straightforward: Control the virus with masks, business lockdowns, social distancing, aggressive testing and rigorous surveillance (including sewage testing, which gives early warning that the virus is present). If our peer countries can do it, we can, too. Our children are worth it. 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.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
For most voters, the idea of more government borrowing and spending is about as popular as the Zika virus. And while Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump agree on almost nothing, mainstream Democrats and Republicans alike often talk about the national debt the way prohibitionists once discussed booze. But among economists, the outlook is changing. And with interest rates near historical lows and growth stuck in a rut even as the recovery from the Great Recession moves into its eighth year this summer, even some veterans of Washington's budget wars are challenging the reigning fiscal orthodoxy that perceives the perennial budget gap as something inherently sinful. "The views of economists about the deficit are shifting," said Douglas W. Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office from 2009 to 2015 and now dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard. "If the very low level of interest rates persists for years to come, as many experts and analysts think is likely, that's a sea change for budget policy." More borrowing might actually be healthy, many economists say, at least in the short term, by helping to elevate the economy's long depressed growth trajectory. "Deficits aren't good or bad in and of themselves," said Dean Maki, a veteran Wall Street economist now at Point72 Asset Management. "It's far more important whether the spending is worthwhile." You might not have heard it at the party conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia, but regardless of who wins in November, it now appears that the next president is more likely than not to end up backing, if not embracing, more deficit spending. Mr. Trump himself said in a telephone interview last week that he believed more borrowing and spending would help lift economic growth, a departure from traditional Republican economics. "It's called priming the pump," Mr. Trump said. "Sometimes you have to do that a little bit to get things going. We have no choice otherwise, we are going to die on the vine." He added: "The economy would be crushed under Hillary. But no matter who it is, the debt is going up." Mr. Trump insisted that his proposed tax overhaul would encourage American corporations to repatriate trillions in profits now stashed overseas, a windfall that he claimed would help pay for tax cuts. Faster economic growth under his policies, he said, would also ultimately reduce the deficit. But some experts, even those who agree that government borrowing can be helpful, fear that Mr. Trump will push the government to max out on debt, as many Trump properties have done over the years. "Donald Trump loves debt, and whatever empire he's created, he's done it with debt," said Jeffrey Gundlach, a Los Angeles based money manager, whose firm, DoubleLine, oversees more than 100 billion in assets. "And in the short term, the economy could get better and grow faster." Hillary Clinton has laid out ambitious, big ticket proposals. And while she seems much less willing to borrow to the hilt than her Republican rival, the budget deficit could end up expanding if Mrs. Clinton wins in November. "If you get growth out of it, there's no debate that some deficit spending would be a good thing," said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard who has warned in the past of the risks that excessive debt poses to economic growth. "It can add to tax revenues over the long run." Mike Konczal, a left of center economist with the Roosevelt Institute, is even more emphatic. "There is definitely room for fiscal stimulus," he said. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. After the financial crisis, he explained, "we needed a bigger deficit in the short term, then a turn to ensure that the recovery was strong." "Instead," he said, "what we got was a quick turn to consolidation and austerity." Republicans, for all their railing against deficits, have actually presided over the biggest increases in debt. And Mr. Trump is well within that tradition. Mr. Gundlach compares the G.O.P. standard bearer to another Republican who talked tough on spending but presided over a boom fueled by debt and tax cuts in the 1980s: Ronald Reagan. But the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan group that advocates fiscal restraint, estimates that Mr. Trump's plan to cut taxes could raise the national debt by 11.5 trillion over the next decade to roughly 35 trillion in 2026. Hillary Clinton, while also likely to preside over a rise in federal borrowing, is far more restrained. But her proposals could quickly add up. For starters, she is calling for a 275 billion increase in infrastructure spending over five years (and many of her advisers are talking privately about a much bigger program). According to Mrs. Clinton's plan, adjusting the business tax code would "fully pay for these investments." Yet a broad overhaul of corporate taxation has been talked about by both Democrats and Republicans in Washington for years with little to show for it. Mrs. Clinton has also proposed expanding coverage under the Affordable Care Act, as well as increasing access to early childhood education while heavily subsidizing in state tuition at public colleges and universities for students whose parents earn less than 125,000 a year. But even though economists generally favor higher education spending as a spur to productivity, many forecasters concede that Mrs. Clinton's tuition aid plan could expand borrowing by several hundred billion dollars. Jacob Leibenluft, a senior policy adviser to Mrs. Clinton, emphasized that additional spending was needed, even if it meant increasing taxes. "Decades of underinvestment have real economic consequences," he said in an interview. "This is a real opportunity that we can't afford to miss, and when we put forward these investments, we should be able to pay for them by raising more from the wealthiest and from major corporations." Even without new spending, the federal budget deficit is expected to rise. By 2020, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, the deficit will hit nearly 800 billion, or about 3.7 percent of expected economic output, as increasing entitlement costs for retiring baby boomers take their toll on federal coffers. That would be a reversal from Washington's recent fiscal course, in which the budget deficit dropped from a postrecession high of 1.4 trillion in 2009 to 438 billion last year. The savings in Washington came at a price, however. From 2011 to 2014, austerity in the public sector fostered an economic headwind, reducing overall growth by nearly half a percentage point annually, economists estimate. That might not seem like much, but given the prevailing rate of just under 2 percent a year during that period, shrinking government outlays moved the needle sharply downward. Looking ahead, the key to delivering an economic payoff, Mr. Rogoff said, is to target the extra money to enhance economic productivity over the long haul, citing projects like rebuilding and improving the nation's infrastructure and improving training so more workers can develop the skills employers need. That's especially true now, when the federal government has the ability to borrow at exceptionally low interest rates. Yields on benchmark 10 year government bonds stand at just over 1.5 percent, having fallen by more than half since 2010. "If the cost of investing goes down, you should do more of it," Mr. Elmendorf said. "While federal spending is on an unsustainable path and eventually has to be addressed, I don't think it's urgent to make cuts in spending or increase taxes." Mrs. Clinton's approach, Mr. Rogoff said, would be economically superior to Mr. Trump's version, which would largely pay for tax cuts targeted at the wealthy. The problem with Mr. Trump's fiscal plan, Mr. Konczal said, isn't necessarily that it would produce a deficit instead, it is what the government would be borrowing to pay. "Running deficits to get the economy going, that'd be good," he said. "The problem in Trump's tax plan is that is such a shift in power to wealth holders. It's comically large in terms of the tax cuts for the rich." But others say that Mr. Trump particularly if he combines tax cuts with the extensive building program he has promised, not just along the border with Mexico, but also throughout the nation's industrial heartland could kick start a growth surge of his own. "I'm not a policy maker and I don't pass judgment," said Mr. Gundlach of DoubleLine, who is among the nation's biggest bond fund managers. "In the short run, it'll have the appearance of working. Long term, if you took the national debt to 30 trillion, the consequences are unimaginable."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
One day about 10 years ago, the dancer Jermone Donte Beacham received a message from a stranger on YouTube. He ignored it, but the stranger kept trying to contact him. Finally he decided to write back. The stranger (now friend) was the choreographer Jumatatu M. Poe, who had come across videos of Mr. Beacham performing J Sette, an exacting, exuberant dance form that emerged in the early 1980s among majorette teams at historically black colleges. Originally danced only by women, the form took on a parallel life among queer black men, practiced in competitive squads at gay clubs and pride parades, where gender binaries could more safely be broken. In the decade since their YouTube meeting, Mr. Poe and Mr. Beacham have been developing "Let 'im Move You," a prodigious, joyous, sensual and deeply considered exploration of J Sette, made up of multiple parts: some for theaters and galleries, some for nightclubs and city streets. Over nine days this month, the series moved through the Bronx and the Lower East Side, in and around BAAD! (Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance) and Abrons Arts Center, at times stopping traffic. The story of how the two met, as told by Mr. Beacham, appears in a companion publication to "This Is a Formation," the latest part of the project, which had its New York City premiere at Abrons on Thursday. "I am scared, even as I am courageous, t o share something that I have nurtured with such precious attention for years," Mr. Poe writes in its opening pages. While this attention can be felt throughout all parts of "Let 'im Move You," the work itself is not exceedingly precious. In a form that prizes precision and unison, the artists experiment with ceding control, making room for spontaneity, imperfection, the freedom to fall apart. They pose weighty questions with a light touch: How do you translate a practice developed in stadiums and nightclubs into a black box theater or a public park? What does it mean to present a queer black form before contemporary dance audiences, who tend to be mostly white? The first two parts of the series "This Is a Success" and "A Study," which were presented at Abrons in 2018 and returned to BAAD! on Oct. 4 address that second question head on. "We brought a whole lot of black people with us," Mr. Poe said in his warm introduction, as a constellation of digital viewers popped up on the wall behind him. "In case you're wondering if something is funny," he added. "Or if you're just in need of a black friend and yours isn't here." Whose space is this? Who is this work for? Those questions arose again in "Intervention," a procession through the Lower East Side on Wednesday. Wherever "Let 'im Move You" goes, it brings this free outdoor component, a kind of roving rejoinder to the insularity of the theater. Like "Success," "Study" and "Formation," "Intervention" plays with the call and response structure of J Sette, in which a leader demonstrates phrases for others to follow. In bright pink knee high socks paired with wintry layers, seven dancers (later joined by a small cohort of local high school students), staked out entire blocks, signaling to one another with swiping arms, arching backs and winding hips, then suddenly sprinting to a new location. They seemed to be tossing and catching complex rhythmic messages, at once cryptic (to an outsider) and absorbing. A small audience followed the procession, but this was just as much a work for the unsuspecting city: for whoever happened to be sitting in a cafe window or riding by on the M14 bus. The city, in return, supplied the soundtrack: "Dancing Queen" blasting from a car window; a chorus of rush hour horns. While "Intervention" began unannounced, "Formation" opened with an abundance of introductions, as performers escorted small groups of audience members into the Experimental Theater at Abrons. The dancer William Robinson thanked my group for being there and reminded us that we were creating the work together, then introduced us to each collaborator. We would, after all, be intimately sharing space over the next two hours, free to roam around the black box stage and dance if we wanted as the performers called and responded to DJ Zen Jefferson's infectious mix of Beyonce, Rihanna, Mariah Carey and more. Motifs from previous installments resurfaced: couples slowly, tenderly enmeshing between hard hitting, exhilarating group sections; dancers filming themselves on their phones. (Audience members, at select "selfie moments," could do the same.) And as in other parts of the series, more performers emerged from the audience as the show progressed; Mr. Poe and Mr. Beacham recruit local dancers wherever they tour, bolstering their core ensemble. (Next year will take them to Austin, Cincinnati, Washington, Chicago and Portland.) By the time "Formation" broke out of the theater and onto the steps outside Abrons, the cast had just about doubled in size. In this way, the work seems to ripple out beyond its originators, with no limits to what it can contain.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
PARIS Economic activity in the euro zone this month reached its highest level in more than two years as manufacturing grew, new survey data indicated on Thursday, providing another glimmer that a slow expansion might finally be under way. A survey of corporate purchasing managers by Markit Economics, a data and analysis firm in London, pointed to a broad if tentative recovery in the zone, the 17 European Union countries that use the euro. Markit's composite output index which tracks sales, employment, inventory and prices rose to 51.7 in August from 50.5 in July. The latest figure was the highest in 26 months. A number over 50 indicates growth. Although not all the news was good the survey indicated a contraction in French output during the month the results were the second recent set of promising signals. Last week, official data showed that Europe broke out of recession in the second quarter of the year, helped by a rebound in household spending in Germany and France. The data "provide further evidence that the currency union continued to expand in the third quarter, albeit at a pretty modest pace," Jonathan Loynes, an economist in London with Capital Economics, wrote in a research note. "On past form, the index is now consistent with quarterly growth in euro zone G.D.P. of about 0.2 percent," equivalent to an annualized gross domestic product rate of about 0.8 percent, he wrote. The world economy could use a European economic renaissance, as investors have been unnerved by signs of a slowdown in emerging markets and anxiety about the timing and impact of the Federal Reserve's monetary stimulus policies. Still, there is little sign that the tepid recovery will be enough to address the main problems weighing on the euro zone: an unemployment rate at record highs and a crisis of confidence in public sector finances. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. Germany, with the largest European economy, led the way again, with output expanding at its fastest pace since January and with manufacturing at a 25 month high, according to Markit data. Carsten Brzeski, an economist in Brussels with ING Bank, said Germany was benefiting from strong domestic demand and improvements across the European economy. "It looks as if new growth hopes for the rest of the euro zone are stimulating German confidence," he wrote in a note to clients, "which in turn could lead to higher German economic growth and could eventually become growth supportive for the euro zone." Karl Heinz Streibich, the chief executive of Software AG, based in Darmstadt, Germany, said Germany had benefited from its diverse pool of thousands of midsize manufacturers. "We are not totally dependent on the well being of 10 or 15 companies," he said by telephone. Software AG has even been hiring people at its offices in Spain and Italy, albeit in small numbers, Mr. Streibich said. But the company, which had revenue last year of about 1 billion euros, or 1.3 billion, is gaining sales in those countries at the expense of rivals not because the overall market is growing, he said. "We don't ride a growth wave of G.D.P.," he said. "It is about taking market share from the competition." Data from French purchasing managers pointed to a contraction, with the index at 47.9 in August after 49.1 in July. That suggests that France's second quarter growth spurt of 0.5 percent, or about 2.0 percent at an annualized rate, might be a one time event. In most European countries, "There's increasing confidence," said Feike Sijbesma, chief executive and chairman of DSM, a Dutch specialty chemical company. "That's good because it could help increase demand." DSM reported on Aug. 6 that sales rose 9 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, to 2.5 billion euros, as profit before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization rose 19 percent, to 345 million euros. Mr. Sijbesma said that DSM's performance was more reflective of its innovations, some of which helped its customers to save money, than of any rebound in Europe. "I'd be very cautious," he added. "I don't want to spoil the party, but I feel that in our business we're doing much better in the rest of the world than in Europe."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
From Mexico to the U.S., a Nafta Tale of Two Truckers NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico Ra ul Garcia Miranda wants Carlos Flores's job. Mr. Flores doesn't think he deserves it. The two men haul goods that travel from Mexico into the United States. Both come from a Mexican border town infested with drug cartels. But Mr. Flores got out. He became a United States citizen, giving him the right to drive through the American heartland and earn good money delivering washing machines and broccoli sent from Mexico. Mr. Miranda, a Mexican national, doesn't have that option. He can make only short trips, back and forth across the border, from a lot on the southern side to truck lots 24 miles to the north. Only a handful now do so. But the fight has entered a new round, with an American president who has shown a special fondness for truckers and their big rigs. The Trump administration has thrown its America First agenda behind the cause in the Nafta negotiations, demanding that Mexico agree to a provision that could, in the future, block its drivers from making deliveries into the middle of the United States. Mexico has rejected that suggestion outright, challenging the fairness of shielding a slice of laborers from low paid foreign competitors, in a trade deal meant to allow most everything to flow freely across borders. More than 525 billion in goods travel between the United States and Mexico in a year, and most come on trucks. The tension over who gets to profit off that flow can be boiled down to the handoff, from a Mexican to an American, of 64 refrigerators destined for Texas. The journey began on a recent Thursday at a lot in northern Mexico, distinguished by a taco truck and not much else. A group of drivers, all men, formed a line outside a dispatch window at Fema, one of Mexico's largest trucking companies, waiting to find out what they'd be lugging into America. As trade between Mexico and the United States exploded in the wake of Nafta, new career paths emerged for men like Mr. Miranda. When he took the job, his idea was to pay off the loan on his house and save up enough to send his young son to school. As it turned out, his job took him away from home so much that his wife asked for a separation a few months after he started. His family lives in town, but he worries about how his son is handling growing up in a home with only one parent. "I didn't think it would be such a sacrifice," Mr. Miranda said. Normally, even after the border wait, the inspection alone takes three hours. Drivers waiting their turn sprawl out on spartan benches and tables, blistering in the heat. While agents in an air conditioned office pored over an ultrasound of the inside of his truck, and riffled through his documents, Mr. Miranda stood and watched. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The conversation eventually turned to President Trump, for whom Mr. Miranda has a measure of respect. "He has good things and bad things," he said. "He's protecting his country on the one hand, but he's also making relations bad." Mr. Miranda got the clearance to head north. He set off on a 20 minute drive to Werner Enterprises, a giant in American freight. When he arrived at the terminal, a pristine repository for shiny blue tractors, he backed his 53 foot trailer ever so gently into an open slot, unhooked his cab and drove off. He dreams of trucking across Texas, through Oklahoma, all the way to Michigan. His weekly pay, he reckons, would triple. "We are all waiting for a deal where we can drive into the U.S.," he said. "There's a lot of hope." It might seem more efficient to hire Mr. Miranda to take the refrigerators directly to their final destination. For 20 years, though, the Teamsters union persuaded lawmakers to stop Mexican trucks from driving beyond parcels of land that hug the border from California to Texas. The union and its ally, an association for independent drivers, argued that Mexican truckers would cause fatal accidents, pollute the air with old big rigs and steal jobs from Americans. When President Barack Obama ended the moratorium in 2015, almost nothing changed. Only 38 Mexican carriers were authorized to make deliveries past the border zone, with fewer than 500 drivers Mr. Miranda not among them. By comparison, more than 30,000 Americans haul Nafta goods from Mexico and Canada. Derek J. Leathers, the chief executive of Werner Enterprises, said there was little appetite among Mexican trucking companies. "Mexican carriers by and large do not have a burning desire for their trucks and drivers to deliver into the U.S.," he said. "It's a special environment with special expertise required." Insurance providers charge Mexican carriers higher rates, as they do with any driver lacking a track record on American roads, trucking officials say. There is a constellation of American rules and regulations that don't exist in Mexico. The truckers have to speak some English. And there often isn't anything for Mexican drivers to take back after they drop their trailers off. The United States buys more from Mexican companies than it sells to them. Like foreign airlines, Mexican truckers can't take things between two American locations; they can only go in and out. Returning with an empty trailer means there's probably no shipper paying for that leg of the journey. The fight to keep Mexicans out by law is senseless, Mr. Leathers said, because the market is already weighted against them. "It's a whole lot of debate and a whole lot of political rhetoric around something that neither side has an interest in doing," he said. That hasn't convinced American truckers or their advocates, who have seen what happened to factory jobs and refuse to trust politicians or executives who tell them that all will be well. All the economic obstacles standing in the way of an onslaught of Mexican drivers can be overcome with enough money, they say. "I could see some private equity group saying: 'Let's buy a trucking company. Let's exploit Nafta,'" said Representative Peter A. DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon. "'We are going to enhance the value of this asset by firing all the American workers and replacing them with 2.50 an hour Mexican drivers.'" He doesn't have a personal beef with the trucker who brought the trailer here, he said. Mr. Flores has never met Mr. Miranda, but he, too, was born in Nuevo Laredo. In 1991, he moved to Brownsville and got married. He and his wife earned money by baking and selling traditional Mexican cakes outside offices. It took him a decade to get his citizenship and cost 1,000 for lawyers and fees. It may sound strange that an immigrant like him wants to keep Mexicans off his route. But Mr. Flores sees himself as an American who earned the right to this work. One in every five people in the business of transportation is an immigrant, according to the Pew Research Center. "Those guys just want to come here, make their money and go home," Mr. Flores said. "I spend my money here. I bought my house. I pay my taxes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Mamba power with its chessboard strategies, gravity defying stealth moves, Marvel Comics levels of proprioception played a role in most aspects of Kobe Bryant's existence, so it is hardly surprising to learn that this also included fashion. He understood fashion's use as an instrument of image creation. Ever the student, Mr. Bryant applied that knowledge to style as craftily as he bent physics to his will on the court. From a teenage prodigy with a goofball grin and a collection of oversize jerseys, Mr. Bryant assiduously transformed himself into a men's wear paragon, a man who would eventually appear four times on the cover of GQ, whose Nike endorsement would be among the more lucrative in sports, whose forays into style went well beyond changing his jersey number from 8 to 24. Now, of course, men like Russell Westbrook, LeBron James and Kelly Oubre Jr. embrace style so avidly that the stroll from tunnel to arena has become a pregame version of the Oscars red carpet. But it wasn't always like that. "As a young player, Kobe was predominantly donning more casual wear, active pieces, baggy sweatsuits and Michael Jordan Bulls jerseys,'' said Jamaal Richards, whose Instagram account MoreThanStats is a mother lode of images documenting the transformation of athletes into fashion leaders. "As he grew as a player, a superstar and celebrity, he turned more toward sartorial elegance and sleek bespoke suiting. It was a natural progression for him since he always had that professional mind state, that mamba mentality." Off court as well as on, Mr. Bryant was precise rather than flamboyant, cerebral, reading the public situations in which he increasingly found himself from magazine photo shoots to red carpets for their utility to him over the long term. That there would not be a long term adds a dimension to the tragedy of his death, since the influence he wielded continued well after he retired from basketball. What he provided for his legions of fans, according to Mr. Richards, was a rare example of what a second act looks like for a professional athlete. "Check his Instagram," Mr. Richards said. "He was the perfect example of a professional, a businessman and entrepreneur, and his style really came to embody those key elements." While his athletic gifts were innate, his game was studied, and the same could be said of his approach to dressing. "He loved clothes, but he's competitive, he wants to learn from the experience," said Jim Moore, the creative director at large of GQ. An image of Mr. Bryant appears on the back cover of "Hunks Heroes," a compilation of images from Mr. Moore's four decades at the magazine. "I was asked last week in Chicago who's your favorite person you ever shot," said Mr. Moore, who has outfitted Brad Pitt and Kanye West, along with just about everyone else. "My immediate reaction was Kobe Bryant." When it came time to shoot, Mr. Moore added, Mr. Bryant was "all focus." Afterward he would take note of the clothes he'd been given to wear and say: "'I love these suits. I really need to ramp up my style game.'" This he did. Evolving away from the mom jeans and flowing Pat Riley style Armani suits of his midcareer, Mr. Bryant adopted clothes of sleeker fit, wore spread collar shirts and narrow cut trousers that accentuated his elongated 6 foot 6 frame without exaggerating it. He began dressing for the post retirement phase of his life and his role as a businessman and entrepreneur. "Kobe's proportions are different from most people," Mr. Moore said of Mr. Bryant's elongated arms and torso. "You can't fake a 42 XL on him." To be sure, there were missteps, most notoriously a pictorial for The Los Angeles Times Magazine shot in 2016, the year Mr. Bryant brought his career to an end with a 60 point performance in the Lakers 101 96 victory over the Utah Jazz. Titled "White Hot," the story was photographed by Ruven Afanador and styled by James Valeri. In purely aesthetic terms, the feature was experimental and largely a success, with the world's most famous basketball player reimagined in flowing all white jersey and hoodies from designers including Damir Doma, Ann Demeulemeester and Kris Van Assche. "The concept was about shooting everything in white," Mr. Valeri said at the time. "That was Ruven's idea. But I wanted to do something more modern and less conventional and less cliched. It's not like, 'Let's just put Kobe in a pair of pants and a shirt or in a suit.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Finding the right bathroom faucet is easier said than done. "Very often, there's no middle ground between 'Downton Abbey' and '2001: A Space Odyssey,'" said Frances Merrill, the founder of Reath Design, in Los Angeles. Many fixtures seem yawningly old fashioned, she noted, while others are too futuristically modern. For those looking for something in between, however, there is good news: The current trend is toward faucets with simplified, classic shapes and a subtle industrial look. Another promising development: The recent craze for brass taps has helped break chrome's headlock on bathroom hardware. "It really opened people up to looking at different finish options," Ms. Merrill said, from unconventional metal colors like copper, titanium and matte black to handles in contrasting materials like crystal and stone. "It's now a place where you can dig in and find some fun things."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
By the end of this summer, Daniel Snyder, the majority owner of the N.F.L.'s Washington Football Team, was facing fire from many sides. Fans had long blamed him for the team's abysmal performance. Now civil rights groups were criticizing Snyder for waiting so long to jettison a team name and logo that they considered racist, and women's activists were aghast after news media reports detailed a culture of sexual harassment in the team's front office. In a normal corporate setting, any one of these troubles might have led to a leader's ouster. Instead, Snyder, a member of the N.F.L.'s cozy club of billionaire owners, may emerge from months of crisis with an even tighter hold on one of the most lucrative franchises in the league. Snyder is in talks to buy out three of his partners, and the sale price may be 40 percent less than they were asking in June. According to three people familiar with the plan who were not authorized to speak publicly about it, Snyder would pay up to 900 million for the 40 percent of the club owned by the three partners: Frederick W. Smith, the chairman of FedEx; the financier Robert Rothman; and Dwight Schar, a real estate developer. The deal must be approved by the league. Representatives for Snyder and the partners' banker declined to comment on the talks. The N.F.L. did not respond to a request seeking comment. The deal, if completed and approved, would end one of the more nasty and tangled ownership battles in the league in years, a bitter divorce that has included accusations of bad faith, malfeasance and mudslinging in a league that prefers such infighting be kept behind closed doors. Sales of shares in N.F.L. teams are normally cloaked in secrecy, with information tightly guarded by the principals and their lawyers and bankers. The boardroom battle in Washington, though, spilled into courts from California to Virginia and even New Delhi before finally landing in the lap of an arbitrator appointed by the N.F.L. to sort out the mess. The court papers in the various lawsuits that have been filed offer an unusual look at an eight month dispute that has included the use of burner phones, profane text messages, accusations of leaks of credible and fabricated information to the news media, and threats of extortion, according to transcripts of phone calls, text messages and emails found in court filings and other documents reviewed by The New York Times. The fight over the team began in the spring, when the limited partners accused Snyder of mismanagement of the team he has owned since 1999, including improperly throwing them off the board, making financial transactions without their approval and trying to block the sale of their shares to outside investors. Snyder claims, in court filings, that Schar, in retribution, schemed to leak to the news media negative information about Snyder's personal life and operation of the team in the hope that it would be damaging enough to compel him to sell it. The sale of the entire team not only Snyder's share but also the stakes owned by Schar, Smith and Rothman would significantly inflate the value of the nonvoting shares the three minority partners have been trying to sell since this spring. A lawyer for Schar did not respond to a request for comment. The team, 6 7 but on track for a playoff spot, has been playing better this season under a new coach. It is at the top of its chaotic division with three games left in the regular season. Yet Snyder has been trailed by controversy, including accusations from cheerleaders that they were sexually harassed and intimidated on the job by well heeled supporters and team employees, and the allegations of widespread sexual harassment in the team's front office that remain under investigation by the league. But, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations, N.F.L. owners believe Schar crossed a line in seeking to publicly malign Snyder. Even so, kicking out an owner or part owner is seen as a rare, last resort, and so they are pushing for a settlement in which Snyder would buy out the partners. Under the plan representatives for the partners are working out, Schar's proceeds would be reduced by millions of dollars as a penalty for trying to publicly undermine Snyder, according to three people aware of the potential penalties. Even then, he will walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars. "The most important thing for the league is its image," said Upton Bell, a longtime team executive and the son of the former N.F.L. commissioner Bert Bell, speaking generally about ownership disputes. "They want to make it look like it's Disney World when it's not. It's business, it's not a moral universe." The fight, at heart, is over money. The limited partners grew disenchanted in May when, during the height of the coronavirus pandemic that was threatening the coming N.F.L. season, Snyder halted the payment of annual dividends to Schar, Rothman, Smith and other limited partners. He did not explain the decision, but it was consistent with similar steps taken by other owners. In a letter reviewed by The Times, Schar's representative then asked Snyder for the team's financial records for the past two years, including cost cutting measures. In early June, Snyder was told that Schar and Rothman had joined Smith, who had been trying to sell his shares for about a year, in putting their stakes on the market. This created a 40 percent block that Rothman argued in a letter to Snyder's banker was worth 1.5 billion, based on the team's total valuation. Angered that his longtime partners were shopping their shares, Snyder threw them off the board of the team's holding company in June. The partners asked the N.F.L. to settle the dispute, claiming that Snyder failed to hold board meetings and did not get proper approval for financial transactions. The league appointed an arbitrator to the case at the end of June. Amid the crossfire of letters between lawyers, Snyder asserted that Schar began a long shot smear campaign designed to embarrass him and force him to sell the entire team. Snyder has long insisted that he intends to leave his controlling share to his children. Key to the scheme, court filings show, was Mary Ellen Blair. She was an executive assistant to him until 2017 who, at the behest of Schar, helped pass negative information about Snyder to the news media. Between July and October, Blair and Schar spoke 157 times on the phone, for a combined 11.6 hours, according to phone records obtained by Snyder's lawyers and filed in court. During that same period, Blair dialed or received 123 calls from telephone numbers associated with The Washington Post, according to court filings. There were text messages, too, Snyder said. "Call me ASAP Mr Schar just called me great news for u call me ASAP please," she wrote in one of several texts to a journalist at The Post who contributed to a blockbuster article in which 15 female former team employees revealed rampant, longstanding harassment of women employees. ("The idea is to force Snyder to sell," Blair texted to a friend.) The Post article in July did not directly connect Snyder to the harassment claims. But he hired a Washington based law firm, Wilkinson Walsh, to look into the allegations. The N.F.L. took over the investigation, which is continuing. "While I was unaware of these allegations until they surfaced in the media, I take full responsibility for the culture of our organization," Snyder said in a statement after a second article by The Washington Post linked to him to two allegations of harassment, both of which he denied. As the substantiated reporting got people talking on social media, less reputable outlets tried to capitalize on online interest in Snyder. The day The Post published its first report of chaos in the front office, a website owned by an Indian company, Media Arts Entertainment WorldWide, published two items about Snyder. One falsely linked him to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Representatives for Media Arts Entertainment admitted they had relied on sources including a Reddit post, and removed the two items from their website. But Snyder sued the publication for defamation in August in India. (The case is ongoing.) Snyder used the suit filed in New Delhi to search for ties to Schar. His lawyers filed a string of discovery motions in federal court in the United States and obtained Blair's phone records and text messages, which showed her communications with Schar and his daughter, Tracy, who, records show, made or received 44 calls to or from Blair. The records also showed that Tracy Schar bought Blair a burner phone to escape detection. When Snyder's lawyers confronted Blair about her phone records late this fall, she gave a sworn declaration that has been reviewed by The Times. In it, she said she and Dwight Schar discussed an allegation that Snyder had sexually harassed a former female team employee in 2009. "Schar knew I would take that information about that employee's sexual harassment claim to the Washington Post, and Schar was encouraging me to share the information with the Washington Post," Blair said in the declaration.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
SOME of us aren't going to the Caribbean this winter. The white sand beaches of Anguilla, I'm pretty sure, have seen the last of me. The day spa industry will tell you that you can still escape from the city, its noise, its dirt and the gray, gray winter by spending a day even a half day being pampered and soothed and warmed. And that's the real point of the urban spa. Never mind that your face and body may end up silky, supple and detoxified. The only problem is that many of us are poorer than we used to be, and spa prices have not generously been reduced in consideration of our circumstances. I set out to try three day spas in Manhattan one with budget prices, one with high prices (but still much less than an island getaway), and one in between to see what level of comfort I could get for my scarcer coin. Here's how things went. Jade, my neighborhood nail salon, may not look like an escape. It's a narrow storefront, next to a Walgreens, on a busy Upper West Side avenue. But up the staircase across from the manicure tables are compact treatment rooms with gentle music in the background. I chose the most expensive package on the sandwich board outside: facial, one hour massage, manicure and pedicure for 155. Just to make the visit a little longer, I added a body scrub ( 98). There are no fluffy bathrobes here or comfy waiting rooms with low light and your favorite magazines. But once you're in the treatment room, it barely matters. Granted, just as the nice facial lady was giving me an extremely satisfying scalp massage, a siren roared by on Broadway. But it took me away from my reverie only for a second. My favorite thing, aside from most services being massage based, was the laying on of hot towels, which for a few minutes feels just as good as the Bahamian sun. No spa cuisine lunch is included, so before my treatment I bought a half dozen chocolate dipped strawberries ( 15) from Edible Arrangements next door. Maybe not a particularly well balanced meal, but low calorie, reasonably healthy and pleasantly indulgent. I enjoyed them during the pedicure while I read. Next time, though, I'll probably skip the scrub; Jade doesn't have large shower facilities. Instead I would have longer, more luxurious versions of the basic services like the collagen facial ( 110), the paraffin manicure ( 22) or the reflexology pedicure ( 55). Four hours or so after my arrival I emerged slack jawed with tranquillity and glowy enough to be seen in public without makeup. 700 Fifth Avenue, at 55th Street; (212) 956 2888, (800) 262 9467, peninsula.com. Escape From the City package: 920. The spa, on the 21st and 22nd floors of the Peninsula Hotel in Midtown, is widely considered New York's grande dame of day spas. The reception area is formal, but the welcome was so warm that I almost checked my e mail to be sure I hadn't been named Anna Wintour's successor at Vogue. Of course Anna Wintour probably wouldn't have gotten lost repeatedly, as I did. In my defense, the spa covers 35,000 square feet. I chose the most luxurious package: a 90 minute body wrap, a 90 minute massage, a 90 minute facial and lunch. With access to the gym and the indoor pool it would be easy (and extremely pleasing) to spend seven or eight hours here. I grabbed 10 minutes in a steam room, but I could have done the sauna too. The hotel's hair and nail salon is separate. No matter how good the other services are, the wrap is a very special treat. I went with algae, for detoxifying. All that pinot grigio adds up, and if every television screen in my apartment is covered with a thin film of black grime, I figure that I must be too. The only downside is getting up afterward on that slippery Mylar sheet you've been cocooned in. Not necessarily something you want to be doing naked in front of a stranger. The Peninsula is all about luxury and comfort. Stacks of fluffy white towels and terry cloth robes and bottles of water are everywhere, so fresh, clean and new that you think maybe you could be too. You have a choice of music (New Age, zen meditation and classical) piped into your treatment room; I stuck with classical. The tables you lie on are heated and can be adjusted a number of different ways. The body wrap room has its own private shower. And there is a bank of showers, each with its own private changing room. And of course there is an additional area, with hair dryers, lighted makeup mirrors and toiletries. Lunch, a bento box of spa cuisine with choice of entree (I had the grilled chicken breast with green lentils and asparagus), is served poolside overlooking Fifth Avenue. I was surprised that the water was served in its plastic bottle, not in Baccarat stemware. The indoor waterfall drew me to Great Jones. Even if you don't want to spend hundreds on a full spa package, you can still enjoy that part. Pay 50 to spend three hours in the spa's lower level water lounge, with access to the spacious sauna, the intense steam room and the large hot tub. Or you can just sit in a beach chair, read and listen to the soothing sound of rushing water. The daytime lighting can feel a little laundry roomish, but the outside world a properly grungy downtown street, two blocks south of the Public Theater seems very far away. I signed up for the package with a 90 minute hot stone massage, a 90 minute facial, manicure and pedicure, and I arrived an hour early to spend some relaxing time in the water lounge. Great Jones is on six different levels, elegant in a more casual, semi industrial way than the Peninsula. There is a locker room, and showers and a makeup area, just not quite as luxurious. Everywhere you look, there are pitchers or coolers of water with lemon slices floating in them and stacks of glassware, to keep clients hydrated between services. My greatest fear was that I would be suspiciously silky, having been pampered with spa services elsewhere the day before. Sure enough, when the facialist analyzed my skin, she found no enlarged pores and almost no blackheads, but if she suspected I was a writer doing research, she didn't say anything. The package doesn't include lunch, but there are menus for the spa's ground floor restaurant, the Great Jones Spa Juice Bar and Cafe, so I ordered a fruit and nut salad. It seemed to be the most delicious thing I had ever eaten, but that could have had something to do with it being 3:45 p.m. Leaving after these three day spa visits, I did feel ridiculously rested and soignee. The hot stone massage, the algae wrap and the chocolate dipped strawberries were my equivalent of vacation memories. For several days afterward I would have been hard pressed to locate even a hint of muscle tension in my normally stress riddled body. It wasn't much of a stretch to pretend I was coming home after an island getaway, without having to endure an inevitably miserable flight home. And even though this sort of thing will probably, regretfully, not become a weekly or even monthly routine for me, it's nice to know that hidden behind certain city walls, delicious escape lies waiting.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
THIS IS NOT PROPAGANDA Adventures in the War Against Reality By Peter Pomerantsev When it came out in 2014, Peter Pomerantsev's acclaimed "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible" revealed a safely distant Moscow where facts were expendable and spectacle had upstaged reality. How times have changed. In "This Is Not Propaganda," the post truth world is already at our doorstep, with Russia less an outlier than an outrider of the states that are putting disinformation to use. Pomerantsev travels the globe from Mexico City to Beijing in pursuit of new forms of media manipulation that mutate as they move across borders and ideologies. In Belgrade, he talks to Srdja Popovic, a founder of the Milosevic era protest group Otpor and now an international guru on nonviolent resistance. Popovic advises searching for a "lowest common denominator" to unite the interests of supporters. For Otpor, that binding message had been Serbia's urgent need to join the West. But today, far right websites like Infokrieg draw on Popovic's formula when instructing their own followers to look for "lowest common denominator themes: mass migration, Islamification, identity, freedom, tradition." This weaponization of identity and information also serves the aims of authoritarian states. The former Kremlin spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky tells Pomerantsev that the collapse of Soviet power left an ideological vacuum that he filled with a new language rooted in vague emotions. To get people to vote the way you want, Pavlovsky says, "you need to build a fairy tale that will be common to all of them." Pomerantsev visits the site of one such fairy tale by following the activist Lyudmila Savchuk into the belly of the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg. There, an army of online trolls sows confusion and disinformation by posting pro Russia articles and comments on websites worldwide. Indeed, all roads seem to lead back to Russia, including Pomerantsev's own. After nearly a decade in Moscow, he returned to London in 2010 because he "wanted to live in a world where 'words have meaning,' where every fact was not dismissed with triumphant cynicism as 'just P.R.' or 'information war.'" But with Brexit and Donald Trump's election, the Russia he had known "seemed all around me: a radical relativism that implies truth is unknowable, the future dissolving into nasty nostalgia." Trump's promise to "make America great again" echoes Vladimir Putin's pledge to restore Russia's past greatness.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
NASHVILLE I bought four face masks from Etsy early on in this pandemic, anticipating the day when my husband's 91 year old father would need to flee his retirement community. Papa saw no reason to leave his apartment while it was coronavirus free, and we needed to make sure our home was a safe place for him to come to when the virus took hold there. We figured it was just a matter of time. So far not one resident of my father in law's retirement community has tested positive, and contrary to all predictions, including my own, Tennessee has successfully flattened the curve: Barely more than 350 Tennesseans have died of the coronavirus so far, and the expected run on emergency rooms and intensive care units never happened. Losing hundreds of people is nothing less than a tragedy a preventable, brutal, unforgivable tragedy. But in a state with a population of nearly seven million, a death rate of five per 100,000 people means that most Tennesseans have no personal experience with this particular tragedy. The same is true throughout the South, where death rates are mostly in the single digits. Even in Southern states with a relatively high death rate like Georgia's 18 per 100,000 or Louisiana's 58 the infections cluster in urban areas. And those relatively high numbers still fall far short of New Jersey's 126 deaths per 100,000 or New York's 150. You don't have to live in a conservative echo chamber to see that this virus has left Trump country more or less untouched. This is what I tell myself, at least, when I see so much hatred generated by a simple face mask. If the worldwide health calamity hasn't touched you or anyone you know, while the economic calamity is personal, something you contend with on an hourly basis, maybe it does begin to seem like the health emergency is nothing more than a figment of the liberal imagination. That kind of logic makes no sense in the face of a pandemic that has so far claimed 100,000 American lives, but I understand it. What I don't understand is the pure ugliness I keep seeing online. I'm trying to understand what someone could possibly be thinking in calling Rosanne Cash's daughter "a liberal pussy" for wearing a mask in a Nashville grocery store. I'm trying to understand why a man waving an American flag would also be carrying a sign that reads, "Selfish and proud." Why someone would hang an effigy of Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, from a tree. Why hateful people would cough in another person's face to demonstrate their own disdain for masks. I was thinking about all this out loud on Facebook the other night, and I asked my family and friends, many of them fellow writers, about their own experiences around the issue of masks. The outpouring of stories stunned me both the number of people who responded and what they had to say. The confusion and the fury, it turns out, are on both sides: Sometimes the yelling comes not from a virus denier but from a mask wearer in scenarios outdoors in the early morning, say, with almost no one else on the street when no reasonable person would think to wear a mask. Sometimes rural people interpret the mask not as a sign of caution and concern but as a sign of active infection. Some of the most conservative people I know are the most enthusiastic about masks, it turns out, and some of the most liberal express doubts about how medically useful a handmade mask really is. "Would you buy a colostomy bag from Etsy?" one friend asked in a private message. The stories went on and on, and many suggest that attitudes toward masks are already evolving, quietly becoming more common, less divisive. Some of the responses were exactly what you'd expect from this polarizing situation, but many others gave me something to think about that I'd never considered before. Instead of summarizing them all, I'm including a sample of the responses here in case some of them surprise you too: "I have been making masks for two groups our church is providing them for an organization that aids the homeless and the Department of Juvenile Justice. I try as I am sewing to be intentional about the act, thinking about who might wear it, hoping they are protected in some way by it and lifting up a prayer for their life, that it might somehow turn for the better in spite of this experience. I find it so sad to think that there are people who maybe are not wearing them simply because they do not know how to get them, can't afford them or maybe really do not know they need to. It is these among us who I believe most deserve our mercy and our love." "Lots of (mostly) women here have started cranking out masks and bringing them to a university center for distribution. One day while we were changing shifts at the center, there were five of us in the kitchen more than there should have been. We were talking about child rearing. I think we were tired, and tired of being careful, and we were all laughing, the kind of laughing that is a release, the kind that you don't want to let go of. Then someone who had come to drop off masks walked in. She said, 'I am sorry. I just had to come inside. I heard you from the parking lot, and it has been so long since I heard laughter. I needed to come inside.'" "I saw a woman in the grocery store not wearing a mask, and I said, 'No mask?' and she said, 'You're not my mother.'" "I was in a pharmacy the other day and stepped between some shelves so that a masked employee could pass without us getting too close. She said 'thank you' in a tone that made me think she was pleasantly surprised. It has to be tough to be working in these stores with so many customers showing you no consideration at all." "In the checkout line at the grocery store in Powell, Tenn., the clerk looked at my Ravenclaw mask, nodded knowingly and said, 'Hufflepuff.'" "Over here in East Nashville every other house is swarming with workmen tearing down or rebuilding houses. I walk Zolene every day and had a delightful encounter last week with two guys who had a little dog with them. One guy was wearing a bandana, the other not. But Zolene and Ruby had a hell of a time racing around the tiny front yard. We three watched them fondly, and our masked or unmasked status was completely not an issue. I find that more common now than in those ancient early days when there was a definite sense of tribalism." "Many Alabama high schools opted to hold traditional graduations. Our high school scheduled students to graduate individually. That meant our principal stood on a stage for five days, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., wearing a mask and greeting each graduate and family. I'm sure wearing a mask for five days straight was a misery, but it was also an act of love and concern and the best way to keep families safe." "I have been in rural Virginia doing building maintenance on my mom's farm. There seem to be two main sets of extremely angry people here those who wear masks, are terrified of the virus, and want outsiders, even property owners, to stay away. Then there are the rabid anti maskers, with an attitude of 'Don't tread on me, this is all being blown out of proportion, I'm not scared of the virus and I'll fight anyone who makes me wear a mask.' As a mask wearing nonresident, it's been nerve racking." "The medicine aisle in our local grocery store is constricted in both length and breadth. I was looking quickly for the vitamins I wanted when a man without a mask started to enter. I gestured to him to wait for a minute since I was almost done. His response was extreme fury. Gesticulating, he reminded me of how many people die every day from flu and car accidents. I told him that it was for him as much as it was for myself that I was asking him to wait. Then I walked out of the aisle from the other side without picking up what I needed." "I've been pleasantly surprised here in southwest Arkansas that each time I venture into Walmart, masked and gloved, to buy food and supplies for my wife and me and two elderly parents who live with us, more shoppers appear to be wearing masks. In the aisles people are pausing to keep distance. It may be just that we live in a small town, but I'm cautiously (very cautiously) optimistic." "After going for groceries about a mile from our house and feeling stared at for wearing a mask, I took a jaunt to liberal West Knoxville, about a half hour away. It was my first experience seeing employees wiping down carts and counting heads. Everyone in the store was wearing a mask. I anticipated a copacetic crowd there. What I didn't expect was to break down crying beside the avocados. The reality of being in a mask wearing crowd, the validation of the need for masks, being accepted with like minded shoppers were a relief and a terror to me. Evidently the reality had elbow room to move around inside me when I let down my defenses." "On my way to Charlotte, I had to stop at a convenience store for the restroom. I walked far around one employee on a smoke break outside the store. I was the only person of perhaps 20 inside who was masked and was clearly being given the stink eye. I brought a drink to the counter to pay and the employee behind the plexiglass screen asked me if that was all. I said yes, and he said, 'Take it.' I was like, 'Oh thanks, happy Mother's Day?' And he said, 'No, your mask is scaring us.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Saturn has more than 60 moons, but a handful of them do more than spangle the planet's skies. Snuggled close to Saturn, these innermost moons are small Epimetheus, one of the largest, stretches just 72 miles across. But they are hefty enough to help sculpt Saturn's rings. Orbiting at the edges of some of the planet's main rings, or within gaps between them, these shepherd moons wield enough gravity to herd icy ring particles into place. Some like Atlas tend the bangles by pruning and neatening their edges. Others, like Pan and Daphnis, mow lanes between the rings. "These moons kind of sweep out cavities within the rings," said Bonnie Buratti of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who described the mini moons in a study published Thursday in Science. But the rings sculpt the moons, too, coating them with colorful mounds of ice and crafting some unusual shapes. "They're quite different than the rest of the moons," said Carly Howett of the Southwest Research Institute, a co author. "Some of them look absolutely crazy."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Rich nations need to help poor ones now. It's morally right and in everyone's self interest. The coronavirus has hit the poorest the hardest, but until recently, they have mostly been in wealthy countries. Now, even as the pandemic continues to claim lives in high income countries and especially the United States it's spreading with ferocity in lower and middle income countries. The virus has infected at least 1.5 million people in Brazil and claimed more than 60,000 lives there. India ended June with around 600,000 cases; it started the month with just under 200,000. With limited health resources, widespread poverty, large debt burdens and, in some cases, political instability and conflict, developing countries are the new front line in the pandemic. For countries like the United States and Britain, helping the developing world fight the virus and avoid a humanitarian catastrophe is a moral imperative. Those who have benefited from globalization should help pay when it ails. But it is not just cruel to ignore the rest of the world, it's also against wealthy countries' self interest. No country is reliably insulated from a highly contagious virus as long as it persists anywhere. Just as the virus can spread rapidly across borders, so can economic ills. Many emerging market countries have strong economic links to developed economies. Imagine a future of rolling outbreaks throughout the developing world. One month, factories in Mexico that supply auto parts, health equipment and other goods to the United States might have to close, as already happened this spring. The next month, South Africa might need to suspend mining operations and curtail exports of vital minerals, halting production of phones and computers. And so on through many regions and sectors. Developing countries are buyers of exports, sources of raw materials and manufactured components, and destinations for investment. Getting the virus under control in these countries is key to developed economies moving forward on the difficult path to recovery. Moreover, the pandemic has the potential to create social and political disruption and instability. Governments could fall, migration could rise and ungoverned space could expand as the economic effects of the outbreak push tens of millions of people into extreme poverty, create greater competition for limited jobs and exacerbate tensions in already fragile states like Mexico, Nigeria and Pakistan. The cost in aid, loans and security support down the road could far outstrip the costs of tackling the disease now. The starting point of a smart response from wealthy countries like the United States is to support the hand washing stations, fever testing, isolation centers and public information that are in such short supply in some developing countries. There are alarming holes in the global health infrastructure epitomized by abysmal levels of coronavirus testing. Though the United States isn't in control of the disease at home and the Trump administration is breaking away from the World Health Organization, America remains the most important global player when it comes to humanitarian relief. The world desperately needs American leadership and help. However, while Congress has pledged 1.59 billion in international assistance for the pandemic, it is reported that, as of last month, three months into the crisis, just 11.5 million had been delivered to aid groups on the ground. And a 7.48 billion United Nations appeal to tackle the coronavirus has yielded only 1.62 billion in pledges. As therapeutics and vaccines are discovered, tested and produced, developing economies must have fair access to the drugs. Though global demand will be high, an international bidding war for vaccine doses similar to the chaos created by the scramble for personal protective equipment is both unethical and unwise. At the height of the global AIDS crisis, Kofi Annan, then secretary general of the United Nations, proposed a large international fund that would buy critical drugs at a fair price, maintaining drugmakers' incentive to invest in development, and then distribute them where needed at affordable prices. That call eventually became the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has helped save 32 million lives since its founding. That's what the world needs now. Even if the Trump administration is currently unlikely to support an international effort to distribute drugs, other advanced countries acting together could create the political pressure to bring the United States in. The coronavirus pandemic is a dual emergency: an economic as well as a public health crisis. The shutdown of the global economy has left many heavily indebted developing countries facing a pressing debt crisis that could have even greater spillover effects. The major industrialized countries should lead efforts to increase debt relief for heavily indebted developing countries. The suspension of debt payments approved this spring by the Group of 20 is only a first step. Substantially more relief is likely to be needed, including from China, which is now a major creditor in emerging markets. None of these steps would detract from domestic responses to the pandemic and the economic damage it has caused. But the upside would be significant: reducing the chance of renewed outbreaks in large developed countries, protecting globally connected economies and heading off the pandemic's potentially disastrous geopolitical and economic consequences. That's why providing support to developing countries is not only morally right, but also powerfully in the self interest of richer states. Robert E. Rubin was the secretary of the Treasury from 1995 to 1999. David Miliband, a former British foreign secretary, is the chief executive officer of the International Rescue Committee. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Instagram reminds me of a strobe lit party sprawling down an infinite corridor. Frankly, I find it a little overwhelming. You may start off somewhere familiar, with a small group of friends, but before you know it, you're bumping into famous photographers, stumbling upon a lecture about women in art history or an archive of public domain art works, or getting lost amid imagery that swings rapidly from cheerful to moody and back again. As my colleagues have recently documented, Instagram can take you all over the world. But what I really appreciate about the platform is the feeling it gives you of peering into someone else's half conscious mental cinema, and I use it, mainly, to keep up with artists whose work I've encountered IRL. Here are five of my favorite accounts; New York Times critics will be posting their own picks every week. Morgan Bassichis always brings the same generous energy to a performance, whether it's a self reflective stand up set or leading a crowd in Yiddish protest songs. But nothing I've seen has been quite as charming or perfectly formed as the "quarantunes" that this performance artist has been posting since mid March. These snippets of song delivered in tight close up and accompanied by an electronic keyboard encompass a full range of pandemic reactions, though always with a comic veneer. One assures some of our more negligent political leaders, "Our grandmothers will eat you alive"; another simply asks, "How was your day?" Altogether they offer quick action doses of common humanity. Working in Dubai and Brooklyn, this photographer chronicles the vivid textile patterns, jarring culture clashes and shimmering plastic garbage as well as occasional moments of genuine connection that characterize our image saturated times. (Ms. Qasimi recently said she was interested in the "anthropological sense of unseen boundaries," especially in the United Arab Emirates.) But she brings to her project the intensely focused eye of a nature photographer. Even an image of a group of baby birds dyed pastel colors is constructed with what seems to be open minded wonder at the complexity of our lives and technology, and a basic optimism about making sense of it all. Needless to say, it's an approach that works well on Instagram. Criticism, satire, portraiture they all spring from pointed observations like the ones in the Welsh artist Bedwyr Williams's Instagram cartoons. Illustrating handwritten captions with quick ink and brush drawings, Mr. Williams conjures distinctive art world characters in revealing moments. ("Clever art couple starting a huge argument after three glasses of Malbec each.") Many of his takes are pretty cutting, but there's something like love, too, in just how particular, and whimsical, they can get. ("Mawkish children's book illustrator secretly hates the saddle of husband's unicycle.") As funny as they are when you recognize the types, I suspect they're even funnier when you don't. At his longstanding Lower East Side gallery, the artist Mitchell Algus specializes in bringing overlooked treasures to light. With galleries closed and social distancing in force, Mr. Algus has been shooting photos from his car, collecting eerie, fascinating images of unusual buildings in the New York region, all without a human in sight. (Be assured that he's scrupulous about keeping his car door shut until he and his wife return home.) He annotates some, like the Horgan Academy of Irish Dance, formerly Waterbury National Bank, in Naugatuck, Conn., with interesting background details; others, like four idiosyncratic houses on the Jersey Shore, he leaves to speak for themselves. You might know Al Freeman's "comparisons," side by side pairings of well known art works with found photography from the internet. One memorable example puts "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," Picasso's famously raw portrait of five Barcelona prostitutes, next to a shot of four grinning, naked, ridiculous looking dudes. Comments about sex, sexism, misogyny, cultural appropriation and homophobia hover around this juxtaposition, if that kind of thing interests you but it's also just disconcerting and funny. Ms. Freeman's Instagram presence, heavy with reposts of strange and embarrassing pictures from other people's feeds, has a similar vibe. Following it lets me keep in touch with the sordid crackle of contemporary digital culture from what feels like a safe critical distance.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
SAN FRANCISCO Google and Cisco Systems, two trendsetters in different eras of the internet, are joining forces as the growth of cloud computing puts new pressure on big tech companies and leads to strange corporate bedfellows. The Silicon Valley giants on Wednesday announced a collaboration to help companies manage software and technology services that may run in their own data centers or in facilities operated by external cloud services. Google, the largest unit of its parent, Alphabet, hopes to benefit from Cisco's close ties to corporate customers as the search engine giant tries to catch up to Amazon, the market leader in cloud services, and Microsoft. Cisco could also use some help. The tech giant, which in 2000 briefly became the world's most valuable publicly traded company when its computer networking equipment was used to build the internet, faces a serious threat from cloud services. Companies that once spent heavily on new hardware from Cisco and other suppliers increasingly rent cloud services instead, with companies like Amazon doing most of the heavy lifting in the background. "Every company that built an empire on selling equipment to companies to put in their data centers is feeling incredible pressure," said Dave Bartoletti, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, a market research firm. Cisco has also faced stiffening competition from rivals like the software maker VMware, which announced a partnership with Amazon last year. Cisco and Google executives vowed to offer something different. They said companies have been struggling with the fact that they need separate tools to manage software on their own premises and those running in the cloud, a situation that sometimes causes security problems. By combining Google programming technology and Cisco networking and security software, they said, tech managers can create and manage software that can run securely in or outside their companies' data centers. The idea, said Urs Holzle, Google's senior vice president for technical infrastructure, is to close those "security gaps." Cloud computing has been roiling the strategies of older tech companies for much of the past decade. The concept, besides letting customers sidestep the costs of buying hardware and software, can let companies deploy computing resources more quickly and flexibly. Amazon Web Services pioneered the concept. Synergy Research Group, a market research firm, said in July that A.W.S. accounted for 34 percent of the roughly 11 billion spent on such cloud services in the second quarter, compared with 11 percent for Microsoft, 8 percent for IBM and 5 percent for Google. Amazon and Microsoft are expected to highlight progress in their cloud businesses when they report quarterly earnings on Thursday. Google has moved aggressively to catch up. In late 2015, the company gave the job of running its cloud business to Diane Greene, a widely respected Silicon Valley entrepreneur who helped make VMware's technology a mainstay at many corporations. She made a series of organizational changes, recruited new talent and introduced new technology features. In one important move, Google in September 2016 bought the start up Apigee Corporation for 625 million, adding capabilities to help customers connect their operations with online services operated by others. More mature technology companies have taken different tacks to try to hold on to customers. Some, like IBM and Oracle, offer their own cloud services. Others, like Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell Technologies, have shied away from engaging in a spending war in data centers against deep pocketed internet giants. So has Cisco. The company, based in San Jose, Calif., promoted a concept called "intercloud" that amounted to coordinating a federation of cloud services operated by partners. But Cisco dropped that approach last year, choosing instead to help customers manage "hybrid" cloud arrangements industry parlance for using a blend of operations in a company's own data centers and those operated by a growing number of cloud services. "We think we are one of the few companies that can navigate this multi cloud world," said David Goeckeler, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco's networking and security business. The company has broadly signaled plans to rely more on software and services than on sales of networking hardware, aided frequently by acquisitions. On Monday, for example, Cisco said it would pay 1.9 billion for BroadSoft, which sells online communications services. Other companies also have embraced the hybrid cloud concept. Microsoft, for example, has longtime ties with corporate software buyers and has come up with ways to run new cloud applications in its data centers or on customers' premises, said Al Gillen, an analyst at the research firm IDC. "We see other vendors doing things to compete since what we have is so strong and so unique," said Julia White, a corporate vice president with Microsoft's Azure cloud business. VMware, a subsidiary of Dell, was first known for software technology called virtualization that allows more efficient use of servers but now competes with Cisco with networking software. Russ Currie, a vice president of enterprise strategy at the network monitoring specialist NetScout Systems, said VMware was effectively using its cloud alliance with A.W.S. to court customers. Pat Gelsinger, VMware's chief executive, called the announcement from Google and Cisco a "validation" of his own company's vision. Cisco also cooperates in various ways with A.W.S. and Microsoft in cloud computing. But Mr. Goeckeler said that the Google relationship was particularly potent because of the technological specialties of each company. "We are both users of each other's products," said Mr. Holzle of Google. But in this case, this is about working together to give their customers the technology they want, he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Unemployment is sinking and businesses are churning out more goods and services. Yet even with the economy standing on tippy toes, prices and wages are climbing a lot more slowly than anyone has expected. Now a growing body of research is putting the blame more pointedly on e commerce. The spectacular growth in online shopping, it turns out, is not only tamping down inflation more than previously thought, but also distorting the way it is measured. The caution is unlikely to prevent the Fed from raising benchmark interest rates at its meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington. Central bankers are engaged in a methodical effort to return rates to levels that prevailed before they were pushed near zero to fuel growth during and after the Great Recession. Some officials have raised concerns that the Fed may need to speed up that process, to prevent inflation from accelerating rapidly as the economy heats up even more. But some of the latest findings suggest that those fears could be unfounded and that the official statistics are overstating inflation. "We don't have as good measures of the economy as we should, in part because there are many new digital goods and new online channels," said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the M.I.T. Initiative on the Digital Economy. "At the same time, digitization of more and more of commerce creates a huge opportunity for much better measurement." One opportunity has come from the Digital Price Index, a compilation of data scraped from the web that Adobe Systems recently started collecting. An analysis of that information by Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago and Peter Klenow of Stanford found that prices for goods sold on the internet rose much more slowly from 2014 to 2017 than indicated by barometers like the Consumer Price Index, or C.P.I. Online prices of personal computers fell by 12.3 percent, for example, but the C.P.I. showed just a 6.9 percent drop. Toy prices online slumped 12 percent, while the C.P.I. put the drop at just 7.8 percent. Online prices for photographic equipment and supplies fell 9.2 percent compared with the 0.6 percent decline registered by the official measure. The government said on Tuesday that the C.P.I. increased 2.8 percent in May from 12 months earlier, with much of that jump coming from higher prices for gasoline and other energy items. Not including food, energy and housing, which tend to change a lot from month to month, the index was up a much more modest 1.3 percent. The monthly figures are based on a sampling of 140,000 products sold both in stores and online. Adobe's digital index solely includes internet sales, but the range of products covered is much bigger: 2.1 million transactions every month. "A lot of what's in the C.P.I. is not bought on the internet, like health care and housing," said Mr. Goolsbee, who was also an adviser to former President Barack Obama. But if you compare the same set of goods, he said, "there is massively more deflation" online by as much as 2.5 percentage points. A deflationary cycle, where prices keep dropping, as has happened in Japan, can mire an economy in decline. "Prices are going down a whole lot faster than the C.P.I. shows for the same things," he said. After all, as bargain hunters know, comparison shopping is a cinch online. The result is that merchants are leery of raising prices. The ease of entering the marketplace, regardless of location, further ratchets up the competition. At the same time, internet retailers can often operate at a lower cost than their brick and mortar competitors. Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, has called it "the Amazon effect story." Research into online commerce in Europe also suggests that comparison shopping even across national borders keeps prices low. This work helps explain "why firms might be less able to change prices," said Brent Neiman of the University of Chicago, one of the authors of the research. New online research offers more evidence that "the more efficient method of selling through e commerce is holding inflation down compared to what it would have been otherwise," said Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University. There are several measures of inflation like the C.P.I., used to calculate cost of living increases in Social Security, and personal consumption expenditures (P.C.E.), an index favored by the Fed and they all try to take account of buying and selling on the web. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which calculate those two measures, look at a typical basket of goods and sample prices, at times adding or eliminating items, like food and energy, that can vary widely from one month to the next. Those agencies are constantly refining those calculations, but they inevitably have shortcomings. And as e commerce grows and new products proliferate, some economists argue, the traditional measures have a harder time capturing the full scale of price changes online. Even with thousands of price inspectors, the government can sample only a tiny portion of goods and services sold across the country. The traditional measures are also not well suited to take account of the constant introduction of new and upgraded products like Instapots and athleisure yoga pants. Cellphones, for example, were not included in the C.P.I. until 1996, when about 40 million Americans, or 15 percent of the population at the time, were already using them. In many cases, prices for those new goods like computers plunge over time, but price indexes fail to capture the change. Mr. Goolsbee and Mr. Klenow discovered that new and updated products from the iPhone X and digital assistant devices to electric bikes and toy monkey Fingerlings were flooding online marketplaces much faster than estimated.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Many architects aspire to design buildings with a sense of poetry. When Kyle Page began thinking about a weekend house for his family in Sullivan County, N.Y., it was more along the lines of haiku. "I kept simplifying it to the purest forms, the purest wrapper," he said. That focus on simplicity wasn't just a design preference; it was a requirement of his budget. Mr. Page, 47, is the founder of Sundial Studios, an architecture firm in Brooklyn, and he and his wife, Hardy Stecker, 43, a senior associate at the landscape architecture firm Ken Smith Workshop, wanted a rural escape for their young family. The idea was to create a place where they could relax, cook together and entertain friends, while also giving their children Otis, 4, and Theo, 2 a place to run free. Mr. Page was confident he could design a beautiful modern house. He just wasn't sure they could afford to build it. He began looking for a lot in 2015. After months of searching, he found a listing on Zillow for 19 forested acres with no specific address in Phillipsport, a hamlet in the town of Mamakating, about 80 miles north of Manhattan. With the help of Google Maps, he figured out where the land was, and was intrigued to see that it had a large pond. "I went and checked it out that weekend," Mr. Page said, "and put an offer in as soon as I could." They closed on the property for about 135,000 in August 2016. Determined to keep construction costs as low as possible while also flexing his architectural muscles, he began designing a compact structure at the edge of the pond with a number of distinctive features. The resulting 1,080 square foot home is formed by two connected volumes: one with a gable roof, containing the main living spaces; the other with a flat roof, housing a mudroom, bunk room, carport and mechanical equipment. The gable roofed portion is clad mostly in weathering steel, while the flat roofed part is wrapped in ebonized, rough cut cedar siding, both of which Mr. Page felt would help the structure blend into its surroundings. The steel looks expensive, but is usually sold as roofing material; Mr. Page found it for 1.45 a square foot. For the other part of the house, he had originally considered siding with a shou sugi ban finish (an of the moment technique that blackens wood by charring it), but he discovered that a solid black stain provided a similar look at a lower price. "It's not shou sugi ban, but it's evocative of it," Mr. Page said. Inside, the concrete foundation serves as the finished floor, and an electric ducted mini split system provides heating and cooling. There is no natural gas, propane or oil heating. Instead, Mr. Page gave the building a "hyper efficient envelope" with spray foam insulation, and designed an overhang facing the pond that works with the seasons: In the summer, it shades the living room; in the winter, it allows sunlight inside. In addition to a living and dining area with an open kitchen under a cathedral ceiling, there are three modest bedrooms, two small bathrooms and a sleeping loft. But there is no lavish master suite: "It's hard to call an 8 by 11 foot room a master bedroom," joked Mr. Page, who was more intent on providing enough sleeping space for their children and guests. The kitchen has a high end look, with smoked oak cabinet doors from Reform and leathered granite counters. But the cabinets behind the fancy doors are from Ikea. Much of the furniture was similarly cost efficient made from wood found on the property. An old, ailing maple tree provided lumber for headboards for two of the beds and for the rustic shelves and dining table with benches that Mr. Page designed. He also turned logs from ash trees destroyed by the emerald ash borer (a type of beetle) into stools and side tables by cutting into them with a chain saw to create legs. "The kids love them," he said. "They send trains through them and create bridges between them." Once the major construction was completed, Ms. Stecker developed a custom seed mix for grasses and wildflowers to heal the earth that was torn up in the process. "I tried to knit it back together with the context," she said, noting that wildlife has since returned. "The deer and wild turkeys have taken ownership."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Park Avenue: Flowers and Financiers, in the Thick of It All The inspiration for street names like Canal and Spring may be lost to time and development. But the landscape feature that prompted Park survives, front and center. The long avenue stretches nearly 10 miles, across two boroughs, from East 32nd Street in Manhattan to East 189th Street in the Bronx, where it ends near an Applebee's. But it is perhaps best known for the section below 96th Street. For much of that stretch, a ribbon of lawns, trees and hedges unfurls between the avenue's northbound and southbound arteries. In recent weeks, slender tiny parkland has welcomed beds of scarlet tulips and sculptures with yellow rubber wrapped around poles. Mr. Soussloff, 65, demurred when asked to share apartment details. But a five bedroom in his building is currently listed for 8.5 million. Clouds may be on the horizon. Lenox Hill Hospital, which takes up a full block at East 77th Street, wants to expand its maternity ward and emergency department, along with other upgrades. Among the more contentious elements is a plan for a 200 unit condominium to help subsidize the 2.5 billion redevelopment. The Park facing high rise, to be built by an as yet unnamed developer, would soar 41 stories, more than double the height of the skyline now. Mr. Soussloff calls the project "inappropriate" as currently scaled, though, like other opponents, he values the hospital's proximity. He and neighbors in about a dozen buildings are girding for battle. "We want to push back," he said. On a project website, Lenox Hill, which is owned by Northwell Health, said it is under the same financial strain as nonprofits like the Brooklyn Public Library, which is developing a 134 unit condo in Brooklyn Heights. The expansion "cannot be achieved without monetization of a portion of the hospital's valuable real estate," the site says. The apartment, with a beamed ceiling and casement windows, might fetch 500,000 today. But Dr. Kahen Kashi isn't selling. Although she has rented out the unit for two years, since moving to Long Island, where she lives with her husband and two children, a future pied a terre has not been ruled out. "Park," she said, "has cachet." From East 32nd to East 96th Streets, Park Avenue seems buttoned up, like a Brooks Brothers shirt. Fashioned in serious brick and stone, residential buildings dating to the 1920s and 1930s are largely similar and kept looking their prewar best by numerous historic districts. (Lenox Hill Hospital doesn't sit in one.) For metal facades or swooping rooflines, buyers should look elsewhere. 605 PARK AVENUE, NO. 10B A two bedroom, two bathroom co op with a combined living and dining area with built in bookshelves, in a white brick building, listed for 1.585 million. 646 210 3177 Joshua Bright for The New York Times Blocks typically have no more than three apartment buildings. And some have only one like Park Avenue between East 93rd and 94th, where the Gothic arches of the fortresslike No. 1185 guard a landscaped courtyard. Another desirable building, on an avenue filled with them, is No. 1088, at East 89th, which also has a peek a boo garden. Today, financiers, fashion moguls and chemical tycoons call Park home. A century ago, the makeup wasn't much different, with multimillionaires who hit it big in "oil, steel, railroads, mining, limber, motorcars, banking, real estate, moving pictures, foreign trade, speculating, the manufacturing of widgets, the marketing of toothpaste, the distribution of the assets of button kings," writes Michael Gross in "740 Park," his book about the limestone co op at East 71st that may be the avenue's most exclusive address. Downstairs, the central stretch of the avenue can seem especially proper, thanks in no small part to the uniforms worn by so many of its doormen, whose caps and epaulets are a common sight. If the sidewalks look spotless, it is not because gum chewers wrap up their leftovers, but because those doormen hose down the pavement. 1150 PARK AVENUE, NO. 2C A two bedroom, one bathroom co op with a decorative fireplace, a galley kitchen and beamed ceilings, in a prewar building, listed for 999,000. 917 363 1992 Joshua Bright for The New York Times Other commonplace details include green awnings, brass door handles and medical offices of chiropractors, dermatologists and plastic surgeons tastefully announced by small, mounted metal plates. "It's just a whole different feeling, being on Park," said Anthony Ortiz, 57, a florist whose store at East 82nd, Design By Anthony Ortiz, opened in 2013 and is one of the few places to shop. Besides providing bouquets for apartments and lobbies, Mr. Ortiz makes sure the avenue's tree pits never look too bare. A few condos, usually in older buildings, can be found up and down the avenue, including at Nos. 80, at 38th Street, and 1235, at 96th. But a new generation of super tall buildings has also pushed in, among them No. 432, with 88 stories, and No. 520, with 54. As of April 30, there were 273 apartments, mostly co ops, listed for an average of 4.84 million on StreetEasy (excluding new developments). In contrast, the average home price in Manhattan is 2.12 million, according to Douglas Elliman Real Estate; co ops average 1.29 million. Still, more than a third of the apartments were listed for less than 2 million. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. The priciest was a seven bedroom, six bathroom duplex at No. 515, a late 1990s condo, for 39.5 million; the least expensive was a studio at No. 7, a co op, for 374,000. 1199 PARK AVENUE, NO. 10B A one bedroom, one bathroom co op with parquet floors and a galley kitchen, in a red brick postwar building, listed for 789,000. 917 749 6522 Joshua Bright for The New York Times Although high end properties across the city are struggling to find buyers, the market on this stretch of Park Avenue seems strong. In 2017, the average closing price for co ops there was 2.85 million, according to StreetEasy; by 2018, it had jumped to 3.27 million. Condos saw even bigger gains. But some buildings appear to be weighted with inventory: Ritz Tower, at No. 465, has 18 units listed for sale; the Beekman, at No. 575, has 13; and Trump Park Avenue, No. 502, has eight. Rentals are all over the map: One bedrooms, for example, can rent for anywhere from 2,500 to 15,000 a month, according to StreetEasy. From the East 40s to the East 50s, the avenue is mostly an office district. Glassy towers offer bank branches on the ground floor and investment banks above. A typical weekday scene finds executives hustling lunch in plastic containers back to their desks. The Park Avenue Armory, at West 66th, holds concerts and plays like "The Lehman Trilogy," about the banking family, which ran this spring. One of the only places to sit, other than those banks' plazas, is a small park inside the avenue's ribbon, at East 96th Street. The park, which sits astride a tunnel, offers an ideal spot to watch the trains below as they emerge into daylight. Hunter College Campus Schools, which are public but require an entrance exam, offers kindergarten through 12th grade in a medieval esque former armory at East 94th Street. But many Park Avenue families prefer private schools, and often move to the area to be close to them. Examples include the Allen Stevenson School, for boys, on East 78th Street, and the Hewitt School, for girls, on East 75th. Except for a 6 train stop at East 33rd, no subways directly serve the avenue. But Lexington Avenue, a block away, has many stops. Reverse commuters can catch Metro North trains at Grand Central Terminal, at East 42nd Street. Originally known as Fourth Avenue, Park adopted its current name around the turn of the 20th century. But it took a while to get there. First, the trains, which ran at street level in the 1830s, were submerged in open air trenches. After several years, those trenches were covered with platforms, and upscale developers followed. Parkland claimed the old train right of way, with walking paths winding through its center. But a 1920s effort to widen the avenue for cars forced the removal of most of those walkways. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Detainees and soldiers at the U.S. military's detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002. Military psychologists participated in interrogations before a policy change by the leading professional organization. Members of the American Psychological Association voted against allowing psychologists to resume work at certain detention centers like the one in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After an escalating debate about the role of psychologists in military prisons, the American Psychological Association voted on Wednesday to reject a proposed change in policy that would have allowed members to treat detainees held at sites that do not comply with international human rights laws. The proposed change would have reversed a 2015 determination by the association that prohibited such work, effectively blocking military psychologists from sites like the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, maintained by the United States. That decision followed revelations that in the early 2000s the association had finessed its ethics guidelines so that psychologists could aid interrogations by suggesting lines of questioning, for example, or advising when a confrontation had gone too far or not far enough. The A.P.A. still forbids psychologists from participating in interrogations. The newly rejected policy change simply would have permitted psychologists in uniform to provide therapy and counseling to detainees who asked for it. The association has little direct authority to restrict members' ability to practice. But state licensing boards can suspend or revoke a psychologist's license for a variety of reasons, including violations of the ethics code or professional policies. The current policy allows psychologists to work in detainment facilities deemed in violation of human rights standards only if they represent an independent organization, like the International Red Cross, or detainees themselves, not the military. 'This profession is built on trust. How on earth is a detainee going to have trust when psychologists have been doing and recommending bad things?' So far, psychological help from those sources has been slow to materialize for detainees, said Col. Sally Harvey, a past president of the association's military division who had pushed for the change. The military has other health care workers on staff at detention facilities, including nurses, doctors and psychiatrists, she noted. But under current policy psychologists, who provide talk therapy and other forms of guidance, cannot do so. "If it's 2 a.m. on a Sunday and a detainee in Guantanamo wants to talk to a psychologist, he should have that access," she said. "It's about their choice, in a situation where they don't have any choices." Opponents of the change saw it as a dangerous retreat on a core ethical issue for the profession. "Unfortunately, the profession was tainted when some psychologists moved into interrogation," and others into torture, said Stephen Soldz, director of the social justice and human rights program at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. "This profession is built on trust," he added. "How on earth is a detainee going to have trust when psychologists have been doing and recommending bad things?" The association's governing council of representatives voted the proposal down 105 to 57 after numerous delays and after rejecting a motion to withdraw the proposal for further discussion. The debate over the role of military psychologists has persisted for many years and is not likely to be resolved soon.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
LOS ANGELES In one of his first moves as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Klaus Biesenbach has expanded his board to include four new members: Adrian Cheng, Simon Mordant, Julia Stoschek and Marina Kellen French. The first three are board members of MoMA PS1, where Mr. Biesenbach had been director through late October. All four are based in major art capitals outside of California. Mr. Cheng, from Hong Kong, founded the K11 Art Foundation to give Chinese artists a more international platform and serves as a board director of the National Museum of China Foundation and a board member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, among others. Mr. Mordant, from Sydney, is chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and a member of the Tate and MoMA International Councils. Ms. Stoschek, from Berlin, a collector of video, performance and other time based art, is a co chairman of the Kunst Werke Institute for Contemporary Art. Ms. French, from New York, is a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Academy in Berlin. Ms. French has also been involved with MoMA PS1, though not as a trustee. "She made MoMA PS1 free for New Yorkers for five years in a row," said Mr. Biesenbach. Her commitment to free museum admission might come in handy, as Mr. Biesenbach has been seriously considering suggestions from local arts leaders that he take the Museum of Contemporary Art free of charge, along the lines of the city's other contemporary museums, the Broad and the Hammer. But he said he is not rushing into anything, given "all the implications that free admission could have," not just in lost entrance fees but also lost membership revenue and possibly increased staffing and facilities needs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Some of the most important specialties needed to fight the coronavirus pandemic are intensivists and critical care nurses the physicians and nurses specially trained to manage ventilators and life supporting medications essential for critically ill patients. There are currently fewer than 65,000 physicians, physician assistants and advanced practice nursing intensivists and about 550,000 critical care nurses in the United States. Those physicians who have been trained to care for patients in the hospital, known as hospitalists, are another crucial specialty, but there are only a little over 50,000 in the United States. Further complicating the provider shortage is the nature of coronavirus, which is highly contagious. Like foot soldiers marching at the front of an assault, first line doctors and nurses need robust layers of backup personnel in case they fall ill and become an infectious risk to others. To do that, doctors and nurses have had to become creative. Retired health care providers are volunteering to operate telehealth centers so that younger colleagues can go into the hospital and serve as backup. Surgeons, anesthesiologists, recovery room nurses who have some experience with critically ill patients are being called in to care for Covid 19 patients in the intensive care unit. "We are thinking of this as an all hands on deck approach," said Dr. Sumant Ranji, chief of the division of hospital medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. But perhaps the biggest barrier to mobilizing the insufficient health care force that we have is the disease itself. Most doctors and nurses are accustomed to "covering" one another, working longer hours or making do when there are not enough health care providers. Few, however, have labored under the constant threat of becoming ill with something for which we have no cure or treatment, nor lived under the crippling fear of infecting loved ones at home. The fear is multiplied as supplies of masks and equipment dwindle and health care workers are asked to work longer hours with little respite or protection. "Even though we are protecting, we have had instances where inadvertent exposure has occurred and the reaction has been, 'I need to self quarantine and self monitor, but am I going to die?'" said Dr. Vineet Chopra, chief of the division of hospital medicine at Michigan Medicine and the University of Michigan Medical School. "That fear is not irrational."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
"The Life of Washington," a series of frescoes at George Washington High School in San Francisco, includes images of slaves and a dead Native American, which angered some students and parents. After half a century of intermittent debate and protest, the San Francisco Board of Education voted unanimously in June to whitewash the 13 murals depicting the life of George Washington that line the halls of a high school named for the first president. The murals' offense is that they depict some ugly truths about the history of the United States, namely two of its original sins: slavery and the Native American genocide. Scenes of slaves at work in the fields and barns of Washington's Mount Vernon and a dead Native American that appear in three of the murals have understandably upset some minority students at the high school, and some parents. They find the images degrading, and their feelings should be taken into account. But there are other, more creative alternatives to overpainting that might be more beneficial for all concerned. The murals were painted in 1935 and 1936 under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, which created jobs for the unemployed suffering through the Great Depression. They were the work of a Russian emigre and Communist named Victor Arnautoff (1896 1979). I've not seen them in person and may not get the chance but the eight or so I found online struck me as among the most honest and possibly the most subversive of the W.P.A. era. In a democracy, destroying a work of art is never a solution to any offense it may give. Once art has been made and released into the often choppy flow of life, it should stay there. It will live on anyway. To dictate its elimination is an implicitly autocratic move, similar in spirit, if not scale, to the deliberate demolition of ancient art and artifacts by the Taliban and the Islamic State. The offended parties in and around the high school assume that their feelings about the murals are permanent and paramount. Those favoring destruction think that they know what the art is about, and that they have the right to decide for everyone, now and in the future, what will be accessible, what will be known. But reactions to art are in constant flux, and the best art should contain multitudes of interpretations. Does the Board of Education really want t he destruction of an 83 year old mural cycle on its hands? It recalls the shameful eradication of "Man at the Crossroads," the Diego Rivera mural that was plastered over at Rockefeller Center in 1934 by the Rockefellers. Now, like then, it raises the question: Who owns a work of art? As the angry Rivera wrote in a letter, "If someone buys the Sistine Chapel, does he have the authority to destroy it?" Art, especially effective art, is never really owned by anyone. Working during the interwar period, when prejudice was rampant and Jim Crow prevailed, and not just in Southern states, Arnautoff did not just paint your grandfather's W.P.A. murals. His Communist faith evidently made him determined to avoid the typical patriotic gloss of Washington's life and also to teach some larger lessons, and he did so with great care. After all, his designs had to pass committee approval. Which they did, enabling him to discreetly even gently insert slavery and the Indian genocide into his murals without sensationalizing them. These are among the scars on this country that every American schoolchild or adult, of any race should learn about in detail, keep learning about and never forget. The murals are amazing feats of storytelling, full of visual subtleties, quiet messages and jolts. The main actors in each scene are physically substantial and dignified regardless of race. The slaves wear white, signaling goodness and innocence. All the figures have different degrees of autonomy. In "Washington and Western Expansion" the Indian lies on his chest almost as if asleep, his body free of signs of struggle. Washington extends his arm, sending a group of pioneers westward. Walking past the fallen figure, they are rendered in grays: Ghostly, deathly, they tread on hallowed ground, personifying the coming threat of Manifest Destiny. In another mural, two Native Americans are armed with rifles, while others, backed by French soldiers, attack colonial soldiers; three surrender, one lies dead on the ground. None of these more decorous works have caused the protests that have plagued Arnautoff's government approved realism. There have been calls for the removal of the Arnautoff murals since the late 1960s, when the Black Panthers and many students urged that they be covered up. Instead three "response murals" were commissioned from Dewey Crumpler, an African American artist just beginning his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, and now a professor of painting there. Mr. Crumpler understood the need for the Arnautoff narrative to be balanced, but he took the commission only after the students agreed that the Russian's murals would not be touched. After a trip to Mexico to study its vaunted murals, and repeated consultations with the students and the Panthers, Mr. Crumpler painted his frescoes on three adjoining walls just beyond Arnautoff's. Far more metaphorical and imposing in scale, these startlingly dynamic panoramas pay tribute to the achievements and cultures of Black, Native American, Hispanic and Asian people. Their fiery images show immense chains being broken and historic figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Mr. Crumpler told me on the phone that "art's responsibility is to tell the truth." He added that to destroy Arnautoff's murals would destroy his own work , too.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Joe Biden may be ahead in national and many battleground polls, but Democrats are still fretting about whether key constituencies will turn out in November. In particular, they worry about the level of support from young black and Hispanic voters for good reason. Mr. Biden's margins among these groups, particularly African Americans, tend to lag Hillary Clinton's margins in the 2016 election (though the gap is smaller if you compare Mr. Biden's margins now to Mrs. Clinton's at the same point in her 2016 campaign). And young voters were notably unenthusiastic about the former vice president during the primary season. But the Democrats have a secret weapon in 2020 on the other side of the age spectrum: senior voters. Among this age group voters 65 and older polls so far this year reveal a dramatic shift to the Democrats. That could be the most consequential political development of this election. The bipartisan States of Change project estimates that Mrs. Clinton lost this group by around 15 points. By contrast, the nonpartisan Democracy Fund U.C.L.A. Nationscape survey, which has collected over 108,000 interviews of registered voters since the beginning of the year, has Mr. Biden leading among seniors by about six points. We are looking at a shift of over 20 points in favor of the Democrats among a group that should be at least a quarter of voters in 2020. That's huge. This pro Democratic shift is very much in evidence in 2020 battleground states. The list includes Florida, where seniors should be an unusually high 30 percent of voters (a 17 point shift); Pennsylvania (24 points); and Michigan (26 points). In short, the age group that was President Trump's greatest strength in 2016 is turning into a liability. In an election where he will need every vote against a strong Democratic challenge, that could be disastrous and a harbinger of a new, broader coalition for the Democrats. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." Who are these seniors who are turning against Mr. Trump? As you might expect, the racial composition of the 65 and over population is majority white about four in five. And among white seniors, we see the same shift as among seniors as a whole, over 20 points. The movement of white seniors against the president is clearly driving this trend. There are a number of possible reasons for this disenchantment. First, while they are a relatively conservative population group, they are not as conservative as their reputation suggests. For example, according to the Nationscape data (over 20,000 interviews with registered white senior voters since the beginning of the year), white seniors support increasing taxes on those earning over 600,000 a year by 44 points. They also support paid family leave by 29 points and a 15 an hour minimum wage by 21 points. On health care, they support a public option for government health insurance by 34 points. But that liberalism is tempered by other views. White seniors oppose "Medicare for All" by 28 points. And while these voters oppose separating children from parents to pursue prosecutions against illegal border crossing by 40 points, they also favor moving away from a family based immigration system to a merit based one generally a position favored by conservatives by 18 points and charging those who cross the border illegally with a federal crime by 17 points. In addition, three quarters of white seniors believe that the government should promote traditional family values in society and about two thirds think the Ten Commandments should be allowed to be displayed at public schools and courthouses. And, by very wide margins, they oppose reparations for slavery and believe that there are only two genders, male and female. So in short: liberal, but not especially, on some economic issues and fairly traditional, but not draconian, on social issues. It's easy to see why many voters who thought that was what they would get from a Trump administration are now disappointed. Combined with an age related preference for normality and stability, that helps explain their movement away from Mr. Trump. They thought he would bring them closer to the America they wanted, with some of the decency and values of the past. As far as many white seniors are concerned, they didn't get it. For them, Mr. Biden seems like a comfortable alternative. He projects moderation and decency, an image burnished by his rejection of proposals regularly debated in the Democratic primary like Medicare for all and decriminalizing the border. No doubt his appeal has been strengthened by the president's response to the coronavirus, which has hit this group far worse than it has younger Americans. The president's performance, and his ostentatious concern with reopening the economy rather than preventing deaths among the most vulnerable, has not gone down well with these voters. For many, disenchantment actually predates the current crisis. But the pandemic, and Mr. Trump's handling of it, has reinforced the shift. Still, senior voters, even the ones who have recently moved to the left, are not securely in the Democratic camp. Policies that are too far to the left on immigration, health care and hot button social issues could undermine their commitment to Mr. Biden and his party. This may present a particular political challenge after the wave of protests that engulfed the country in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. These voters have a preference for order in one early June poll, 68 percent of senior voters supported or somewhat supported sending in the military to help the police respond to protests so if they come to view Democrats as being soft on the violence that broke out in some cities, that could also reduce enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket. Similarly, demands that have emerged from the protests, like reparations or defunding the police, are politically unpopular with many seniors and could also potentially undercut Democratic support among this new constituency. For now, though, this shift is the most consequential we have seen in this election season. If it remains through November and beyond, it could define a new era in American politics. Ruy Teixeira is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Paule Marshall, an influential writer whose novels and short stories about ethnic identity, race and colonialism reflected her upbringing in Brooklyn as a daughter of poor immigrants from Barbados, died on Monday in Richmond, Va. She was 90. Through five novels and several collections of short stories and novellas, Ms. Marshall (whose first name is pronounced "Paul") created strong female characters, evoked the linguistic rhythms of Barbadian speech, and forged an early link between the African American and Caribbean literary canons. Evelyn Hawthorne, an English professor at Howard University, described Ms. Marshall in the journal The Black Scholar in 2000 as "the critical bridge" between earlier black female writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Gwendolyn Brooks and the next wave of African American and Caribbean writers like Toni Morrison (who died this month), Maya Angelou and Jamaica Kincaid. "Brown Girl, Brownstones" is set in Brooklyn, where a girl named Selina grows amid conflicts between her Barbadian parents a serious mother who wants to save to buy the brownstone they rent and an impulsive father who wants to return to his homeland. Writing in "The Norton Anthology of African American Literature" (2014), Cheryl Wall, an English professor at Rutgers University, said "Brown Girl" was "the novel that most black feminist critics consider to be the beginning of contemporary African American women's writings." The novel jump started a career that toggled for decades between writing and teaching at universities . In 1959, Langston Hughes appeared, unannounced, at a party for Ms. Marshall's book in a Harlem storefront, a characteristic act in support of a young black writer. "There he stood, the poet who had long been a literary icon, come to celebrate with me," Ms. Marshall wrote in her memoir, "Triangular Road" (2009), adding that he was there "to beam at me like a paterfamilias whose offspring had done him proud." In 1961, she earned a Guggenheim Fellowship and published "Soul Clap Hands and Sing," four long stories set in Brooklyn, Brazil, Barbados and British Guiana, all of which featured aging men. Reviewing "Soul Clap Hands," Kirkus Reviews wrote that Ms. Marshall had "expanded a private sense of race and color into enormously wide, almost mystic, sense of the shimmering chiaroscuro of life ." Her relationship with Hughes expanded. In 1965, she joined him and another black writer, Bill Kelley , on a State Department tour of Europe, and he continued to mentor her through postcards and late night phone calls. The prolific Hughes once implored her to write more quickly. "'Paul e,'" he said in one conversation, pronouncing the silent 'e,' she wrote in her memoir . "'Do you realize that I have a book out for every year that you've been alive?' (I was in my mid 30s at the time.) 'You better get busy.' " Valenza Pauline Burke was born on April 9, 1929, in Brooklyn. Her parents were immigrants from Barbados: Samuel Burke was a factory worker and salesman;, Adriana (Clement) Burke was a housekeeper. When Pauline, as she was then known, was 9, her father left the family to join Father Jealous Divine's cultlike religious movement in Harlem. Pauline found influences all around her. The first ones were her mother and her Barbadian friends at the kitchen table of her home in the Stuyvesant Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. They were poets whose exuberant, artful, freewheeling use of language "In this man world you got to take yuh mouth and make a gun!" helped them "overcome the humiliations of the work day," she wrote in The New York Times in 1983. At a local library, she found sustenance in writers as diverse as Jane Austen, Zane Grey and William Makepeace Thackeray. She also discovered the black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The opening lines of his "Little Brown Baby" ("Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes/Come to yo' pappy an' set on his knee") moved her, she later said , because her father had already left. And Dunbar's "A Negro Love Song" ("Seen my lady home las' night/Jump back, honey, jump back") "roused in me all kind s of delicious feelings and hopes," she told The Times. Seeking a stable life for Pauline, her mother suggested that she get a secretarial job at the phone company , which had only started to hire black people. She chose to go to college instead, studying European literature at Hunter College. After a year, she contracted tuberculosis. When she recovered , she transferred to Brooklyn College, graduating in 1952. She changed her name to Paule when she applied for jobs in journalism, believing that the explicitly female Pauline would hurt her prospects. She was hired at Our World, a black picture magazine, and wrote articles from Brazil and Barbados. But she soon turned to fiction. In addition to "Brown Girl, Brownstones," her novels were "The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), "Praisesong for the Widow (1983), "Daughters" (1991) and "The Fisher King" ( 2000 ). In her review in The Times of " Praisesong ," the story of an older black woman on a journey to a Caribbean island, the novelist Anne Tyler called it a "convincing and eerily dreamlike" book that "rings with the same music and some of the same lilting Barbadian speech" of "Brown Girl."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
This mother love is troubled and troubling. And part of the wonder of Laymon's book is his commitment to getting as close to the truth as possible, even when it means asking painful questions about what we owe the people who brought us into this world and, somehow, managed to keep us alive in it. In doing so, he compels us to consider the costs of an insistence on excellence as a means to an end and the only conceivable option for a black kid in America. The toll physical, emotional is painful to behold, especially for readers who have paid a similar price. Laymon's writing, as rich and elegant as mahogany, offers us comfort even as we grapple with his book's unflinching honesty. Just before he started eighth grade, the poor black Catholic school he'd been attending was closed down owing to a lack of funding. That's how Laymon and a handful of his friends end up at St. Richard Catholic School in Jackson, turning vocabulary words into gold and trying their best to avoid teachers who openly admit they find some of the new black students "gross." Well aware of the challenges this new school poses to her son, his mother warns him to "be twice as excellent and be twice as careful from this point on" because "being anything less will get you hell." If this book succeeds as a thoughtful and hard wrought examination of how a black man came into his own in a country determined to prevent that from happening, it's because of the painstaking manner in which Laymon walks the reader through the various perils and costs of striving. When simply being black in America is often a taxing affair, the perception that the choice is between being black and excellent or being black and dead reveals just how cruel this country can be. To say nothing of how often "excellence" and "respectability" are tragically mistaken for each other. It's heartbreaking to see how, again and again, that cruelty warps Laymon's relationship with his mother as she resorts to violence to keep her son in line. When she and Laymon are pulled over by a white policeman in Maryland for driving while black, the officer asks his mother if Laymon is her husband. It's a long awaited dread come to fruition: the moment a black teenage boy begins to look, to casual white onlookers, like an adult. She quickly responds that her son is 15 and hands over her ID. As Laymon begins to lose his temper, his mother forcefully slaps him across the chest, telling him to be quiet and unclench his fists. As she well knows, any behavior less than excellent as determined by a white police officer at such a moment could be fatal. Later, when his mother finds out he has been having sex with a white girl, she greets him at the door by beating him in the neck. She would argue this is to impress upon him the risks of an interracial relationship in Mississippi but also because she'd prefer him to be dating a black girl. It's one of many harrowing moments in which however you might feel about parents disciplining their kids it's clear that her actions have veered into physical abuse.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Did you conscientiously buy dolls for your son and trucks for your daughter, or did you try to avoid the whole thing and give them both gender neutral artisanal wooden objects, only to be shanghaied by the princess industry and superhero underpants? Looking at how children play with toys that fall into gender stereotypes gives us a window on children's developing sense of what goes along with being a boy or a girl. But it can also be an important indicator of what skills young children are acquiring as they play, and of whether their academic and professional horizons are comparatively wide or whether they are already starting to rule things out for themselves. 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. A new study suggests the potential power of words and images to counter gender stereotypes and open up what children see as possible interests and activities for themselves. And experts say that those choices are significant because they can influence the skills children learn and the possibilities they see for themselves. Lauren Spinner, a developmental psychologist at the University of Kent in England, was the first author on a study published in January in the journal Sex Roles, which looked at the effect of showing 4 to 7 year olds images of children playing with either stereotypic or counter stereotypic toys. A researcher read aloud the words that were printed in a bubble beside the image. In one experimental group, the children followed gender stereotype: "Hello! My name is Sarah, and my favorite toy is My Little Pony! I have lots, and play with them every day." "Hello! My name is Thomas, and every day I like to play with my cars. They're my favorite toys!" For the other experimental group, Sarah had the car and Thomas had My Little Pony; the language was otherwise identical. After they had seen the pictures, the children in the study were shown a set of toys, chosen to be stereotypically masculine and feminine (baby doll, jet fighter, tool kit, tea set) and asked who should play with which toy, and the children who had seen the counter stereotypic pictures were more flexible in their answers, more open to the idea that both girls and boys might like toys from both sides of the conventional aisle. They were also less rigid when they were asked which children from the pictures they wanted to play with; exposure to Sarah with the car and Thomas with the pony meant that children were more open to playing with representatives of the other gender. So the toys in the pictures affected who the children wanted as playmates. Dr. Spinner pointed out that seeing the photos did not open up the children's preferences for what toys they themselves wanted to play with; they were more likely to say that other boys and girls could play with a variety of toys, but the two experimental groups were equally unlikely to make those counter stereotypic choices themselves. On the other hand, she said, it was only one exposure, and it's possible, if there were more of those counter stereotypic images around, that children might become more open to enjoying the whole spectrum of toys. Laura Zimmermann, a developmental psychologist who is a professor of psychology at Shenandoah University in Virginia, was the first author on a study published last year in the Journal of Children and Media, which looked at preschool children's responses to toy commercials. Children are showing more flexibility than they used to, she said, in terms of who they thought the ads were meant for, responding that both boys and girls, for example, could like Batman, or like the "female" line of Lego building blocks. "Their behavior got much more stereotypical when they were asked their own preferences," she said, and the boys especially were unwilling to say that they liked any of the ads aimed at girls. But the ads themselves, she said, continue to reflect the same old stereotypes. "My concerns are that children's ads shape and reinforce stereotypes," Dr. Zimmermann said. "They are obviously not working alone; we have wider societal influences at work, but ads are powerful." This is not about taking away the doll, or banishing the train. "If they aren't interested in engaging in non stereotypic gender play that is O.K. too," Dr. Zimmermann said in an email. "Children should be free to play with the toys they enjoy toys should not be 'assigned' by gender." But there is also research to say that when the lines are drawn too strictly, children's worlds become not only more divided, but also more limited. Traditionally masculine toys like blocks and puzzles, Dr. Spinner said, encourage visual and spatial skills, while traditionally feminine toys encourage communication and social skills. "If children only play with one, then they are missing out on a whole host of skills," she said. They are also limiting their own interests and the scope of their futures. "We know that these stereotypes that are being shaped and reinforced can be linked to a lot of different things from educational and occupational goals to academic ability to social development," Dr. Zimmermann said. "It is really important to have children get this broad range of experiences." As children grow up, Dr. Spinner said, they do tend to become more flexible about what boys and girls can do; 7 year olds are less rigid than 4 or 5 year olds. But the messages they get from their environment are important, and so is the chance to play with toys and with other children in ways that don't box them in too tightly. "Mixed gender play is really important, getting boys and girls to play with one another and recognize behavioral similarities," Dr. Spinner said. "Children can overcome their anxieties about playing with other gender children if you can get them to understand there are a lot of similarities in what they like to play with, rather than focusing on the gender of the child." Somewhere between the ages of 2 and 3, children figure out whether they are boys or girls, developmental psychologists say, often citing Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of gender identity development; they go on from there to identify the people around them as male or female, and to create rules and categories of what behaviors and interests and habits go with which identity. "The good news or bad news is, experience makes a difference," Dr. Zimmermann said. The images children see can reinforce stereotypes and limit their horizons, but they can also open up possibilities and lead kids to believe that they have more choices. Children are actively seeking clues about what their gender identities mean; toys and play should give them space, not narrow their choices. Many parents have stories of a girl who insisted on rocking a toy train to sleep, or a boy who pushed a doll along the floor, making train noises, foiling well meaning parental attempts to foster non stereotypic play. And parents don't have to "eradicate" all stereotypical play, Dr. Zimmermann said in an email message. "After all, a princess can play with worms. And ninja cupcakes are quite tasty."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
CANNES, France After weeks in the desert, dehydrated and afraid, refugees and migrants who are apprehended crossing the United States Mexico border are regularly locked in what are called las hieleras: the freezers. They are meant to be short term holding cells they have no beds but they also exact a kind of extrajudicial punishment. As revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request in 2015, migrants are trapped there for nearly two days on average. Children are separated from their families; detainees are deprived of food. Sometimes their lips split. Sometimes their skin turns blue. The cold of the hieleras is the first thing you feel in "Carne y Arena" ("Flesh and Sand"), a groundbreaking hybrid of art exhibition, virtual reality simulation and historical re enactment by the Mexican film director Alejandro G. Inarritu on view here ahead of its art world debut in June at the Prada Foundation in Milan. You enter a cold storage chamber, spare but for a few industrial benches, and are instructed to remove your shoes and socks. Dusty slippers and sneakers, recovered from the border zone, litter the floor. Barefoot, you exit the cold room and enter a larger one, its floor covered with sand. Attendants equip you with an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, headphones and a backpack. The darkness gives way, and you find yourself on the border, and in danger. In the gloaming you can make out an old woman who has broken her ankle, moaning in Spanish for help; a people smuggler, or coyote, complains in English that they're slowing down. You can walk through the sand to get close to them, since your headset is equipped with a motion detector. But soon a helicopter appears overhead, its spotlight bearing down on you, and border agents with guns and dogs are ordering you in two languages to put your hands up. With a rifle in your face, you instinctively throw your hands in the air. Politically urgent and technically accomplished, "Carne y Arena" is the first virtual reality installation to screen in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, which opened its 70th edition this week. Its debut here in an airplane hangar, far from the glamorous Croisette, is a foretaste of its display in arts institutions. Along with its showing at the Prada Foundation, which produced the work with Legendary Entertainment, it will also travel to two museums on either side of the border that President Trump has promised to divide with a wall. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will host "Carne y Arena" starting in July; the Tlatelolco museum in Mexico City will also feature the VR work this summer. Museums will most likely provide a better context for this powerful three room installation than the world of cinema. Mr. Inarritu's virtual reality, or VR, project has a sternness and resolve similar to some of his previous movies, notably the survivalist epic "The Revenant" and the California Mexico strand of "Babel," which netted a best director prize here in 2006. But "Carne y Arena" is not a film, and it succeeds by acknowledging that virtual reality is a wholly different medium, posing different theoretical and narrative challenges. Editing, essentially, is gone. Framing is gone too. Characters must be positioned in three dimensions, not just two. The medium is almost a hybrid of video game and live theater, and to excel, you have to think like a philosopher as much as a techie. "Carne y Arena" took Mr. Inarritu four years to figure out he made the relatively low tech "Revenant" in the process but he got there. In "Carne y Arena," whose virtual reality component runs about seven minutes, traditionally photographed landscapes provide the backdrop for digitally rendered performers. Advances in technology along with the sand beneath your feet make the experience truly transporting, and as the dust rises from the ground, you quickly forget that the Riviera is right outside. (The outdoor images, detailed and menacing, were shot near the border by Emmanuel Lubezki, known as Chivo, Mr. Inarritu's frequent collaborator.) Some technical limitations of the medium remain in evidence when you get close to the performers: not professional actors, but undocumented immigrants from Mexico or Central America, whose 14 individual stories are evoked in portraits appearing in the show's final room. So that you can perceive them from every angle, they performed on a sensor equipped soundstage and have been rendered digitally in three dimensions. Though their clothing and movements are convincing, up close their flesh appears reptilian and their faces generic. But then crouch down, push your head through one of their bodies. You'll find yourself in a bloody, throbbing chamber: their beating heart. "Carne y Arena" may draw most of its power from the real lives of immigrants, but it's a work of fiction, with flights into poetry that set it apart from many documentaries in virtual reality, which has too often been promoted as just an "empathy machine." Just as the border guards are screaming at the migrants to kneel in the sand, a puff of smoke appears. The officers vanish, and a strange dream sequence begins. The coyote is sitting on a truck, reading a book of poetry; the woman with the broken ankle is humming a lullaby at a long table that has materialized in the desert. When you move to the table, its wooden surface starts to deform. A cavity appears, containing a capsizing boat an evocation of another refugee crisis, this one taking place right off the Croisette in the Mediterranean. Like the surreal moment when you discover you can walk into these migrants' hearts, this mournful reverie serves to humanize people we still think of mostly in aggregate. One reason the experience of migration and helplessness feels so potent in "Carne y Arena" is because you experience it alone. In this way, VR is completely different from Imax projections, or from cinema watched through 3 D glasses. Directors and artists have to choreograph narratives in space rather than in frames, and they must also calculate for a constantly shifting point of view. When you wear a virtual reality headset, you become the lead actor, but you're also, in a way, the director of photography as well. So for all the thematic echoes between "Carne y Arena" and earlier films like "Babel" or "The Revenant," I concluded by my third go round that one movie above all might have prepared Mr. Inarritu for the challenge of virtual reality. That film is "Birdman," which he and Mr. Lubezki presented as a single, two hour tracking shot. The exacting choreography of "Birdman," perceived by a camera wandering through a Broadway theater, may have helped Mr. Inarritu model the spatial relations and you are there imagery that VR requires. Classical Hollywood editing no longer serves, and so narrative has to be conveyed in other ways: through setting, sound and physical encounters. It may seem strange that "Birdman," Mr. Inarritu's black comedy, may be the most relevant antecedent for a work as harrowing as this one. And yet virtual reality, in the long run, is not cinema or video art. It's a medium that seeks to become a non medium a tissue of images and sounds that replicates or even supersedes true life. These are old ambitions, of course. The technologies for 3 D viewing have been around for centuries, and convex lensed optical viewers in the 18th century, or depth simulating goggles in the 19th, have come and gone. Whether virtual reality will really reshape art institutions, or whether it will fade like those earlier zograscopes and stereoscopes, is unknown. What Mr. Inarritu has proved, with this formidable new work, is that making VR more than a sideshow medium is the job of artists, and that some stories can compel us more deeply when we are dropped into their protagonists' lives. One of those stories takes place every day along the American border and in the Mediterranean as well by people with no greater designs than the pursuit of happiness.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
An archive of work by Shawn Walker, a founding member of the Harlem based African American photography collective the Kamoinge Workshop, will join the Library of Congress's collection, the organization announced Wednesday. The library worked with the Photography Collections Preservation Project to purchase nearly 100,000 of Mr. Walker's photographs, negatives and transparencies that capture life, primarily in Harlem, between 1963 and the present. The collection also includes photos of political leaders and cultural icons like Jesse Jackson, Toni Morrison and Thelonious Monk. "I have tried to document the world around me, particularly the African American community, especially in Harlem, from an honest perspective so that our history is not lost," Mr. Walker, 80, said in a statement.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Famously, the word "aloha" has several meanings. It's often used, I found during my stay on the Big Island of Hawaii, as a noun loosely meaning a spirit of affection or compassion, one that has persevered through a complicated and sometimes painful history. Maintaining a tourist economy is a tricky dance between locals and visitors. Native Hawaiian families have the lowest mean income of all major ethnic groups in the state. Yet property is unaffordable for many, thanks to outside speculation. Nevertheless, as a visitor in Hilo I never felt resentment; only a laid back, welcoming warmth wherever I went. That sense of aloha came to characterize much of my visit to Hawaii even when my rental car was hobbled by two flat tires. All of that compassion is in contrast not just to Hawaii's modern history, but also its violent physical construction: the 4,000 square mile Big Island is, essentially, one huge volcano. (More accurately, five volcanoes that erupted and overlapped with fiery magma flows.) Flying over to Hilo, on the eastern side of the island, provided gorgeous views of Mauna Kea, the tallest and most holy of the Hawaiian peaks, and Mauna Loa, the bigger, grouchier sibling. "We're not afraid of that one," said Solomon Kaholoaa, pointing toward Mauna Kea. He's the owner of Poke to Your Taste, a small poke shack, complete with tin roof, hand painted letters on the side and a rusted out pickup in front. "Now, Mauna Loa," he continued, "that's the one we're afraid of." (Mauna Kea is dormant; Mauna Loa, though inactive for over 30 years, still threatens the island.) The poke in question was a half pound of cool, bite size tuna cubes ( 7), which I doctored (with guidance from Mr. Kaholoaa) with shoyu, green onion, spicy mayonnaise, chopped garlic and furikake, a dry mixture of chopped seaweed, sesame seeds and seasonings. The result was amazing imagine sushi, only more accessible and casual. I also loved the Spam musubi, another traditional snack that consists of a fat slab of salty Spam sandwiched between two warm rectangles of rice, all wrapped in seaweed. It was only a buck, and made for a great snack later in the car. The service was friendly and meandering; a big sign out front proclaims "If no can, no can; if can, Verna's!" It's a twist on a phrase that sums up, in a lot of ways, the spirit of Hawaii: If something works out, great. If not, no need to worry. Verna's gravy cheeseburger, at 3.65, was something of a revelation. The meat was charred so that the outside of the patty almost had a crust. The gravy and American cheese melded together to create a single, super condiment. I had never had gravy on a burger before, but I can't wait to try it again. Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None Getting Personal With Iman. The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love. A Resilient Team for a Broken Nation. With the Taliban in control, what, and whom, is Afghanistan's national soccer team playing for? The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. When I arrived at Akiko's Buddhist Bed and Breakfast and told my host, Akiko Masuda, about what I'd just had, she made a face and teasingly slapped me on the arm. Akiko's is a quaint and quiet operation just outside the town of Hakalau; I paid 65 for a good size, simple room with a large common space and shared bathroom. Ms. Masuda, like many Buddhists, rarely eats meat, but was not judgmental; her demeanor was an interesting mix of calm wisdom you might expect from one who meditates every morning at 5:30 during the week (as she does) and of a former wild child, a firebrand who had had periods of profligacy. She was, in a word, wonderful. "I was in the Peace Corps, too!" she told me one morning, over a simple breakfast of rambutans, oranges, granola and coffee (breakfast is included, and communal with other guests). Ms. Masuda, who looks to be in her late 60s, is petite, muscular and tan. She adjusted her do rag. "But I got kicked out," she continued, flashing a smile somewhere between sly and winsome, "for shacking up with a volunteer." The B B is set up like a little compound: A couple of buildings hold guests, there's an office, a space for meals, and a different building used for meditation. There are outdoor cats lots of them that patrol the area. (Don't worry about allergies: I'm fiercely allergic and had no problems.) A sample poke from Poke to Your Taste, which offers a do it yourself menu of fish doctored with seasonings and sauces. Marco Garcia for The New York Times There is a phone in the main house, as well as limited Wi Fi, but they're not actively used. There was a slight dampness to everything Hilo is one of the wettest cities in the Northern Hemisphere, and I had arrived just after a period of heavy rain. If you get something wet and hang it up, don't expect it to dry anytime soon. Part of staying at Akiko's is the spirit of ohana, which roughly means "family." Ms. Masuda encourages you to get to know the surroundings, and to participate in activities she engages in. "So Lucas," she said one morning after breakfast, apropos of nothing, "are you coming to clean graveyards with us?" I couldn't turn down an invitation like that. We met up with a larger group of volunteers and spent the afternoon cleaning up an old Japanese graveyard that had fallen into disrepair. Afterward, we made one more stop on Kukuihaele Road. We visited a private residence with some centuries old graves, and also one of the most extraordinary things I had ever seen: a banyan tree that had swallowed an old church. What I loved about staying at the B B was feeling as if I was participating in a truly "local" experience, to use a phrase that's bandied about far too often one that captures the aloha and ohana qualities of the Big Island. Are there big resorts? Sure, but they aren't prevalent around Hilo. Castle Hilo Hawaiian Hotel had rooms starting at 178 when I checked, but most of the large luxury hotels are on the Kona side. "You don't really need to go to Kona," Ms. Masuda told me. "It's just like anyplace else." That's not to say it isn't fun to play tourist. There are plenty of interesting things to see and do in Hilo's beautiful downtown area a long line of old, colorful buildings faces the bay on Kamehameha Avenue. Down a small side street is the gorgeous Palace Theater, built in 1925, which continues to show movies and host events. I spent a day wandering around downtown and discovered Bears' Coffee, where I had a wonderful macadamia nut chicken salad sandwich ( 6.95). From there I visited the Pacific Tsunami Museum: For an 8 admission fee, you get the story of how Hilo was inexorably and traumatically shaped by two major tsunamis, one in 1946 and one in 1960. There are, of course, beaches. One day, I decided to find a beach that had come up in a search for "Papaikou," a small town between Hilo and my B B, and "beach." The result was interesting: Apparently there was a lovely beach nearby (itself public) that could be reached only via private property. After considerable tension between the property owners and other residents, it would seem a detente has been reached: When I sought out the beach at the end of Mill Road I encountered an unlocked gate with a sign posted by the owners encouraging simultaneously, "Take only pictures. Leave only footprints" and "Enter at your own risk." Dodging cobwebs down a long and meandering path, I finally came out to a small but stunning black sand beach, with the husk of the old sugar mill looming above. There was one other person on the beach with me. It was wonderful. The other worthwhile tourist activities one would typically associate with the Big Island? Volcanoes. But also coffee. I stopped by the Hilo Coffee Mill in Mountain View and got an education during a brief tour. The most interesting part? "Dark" roasted coffees are not, in fact, stronger. Roasting coffee takes the caffeine out. The lighter the roast, the more potent. I found this out soon after trying a 12 ounce cup ( 3), as I was positively buzzing while heading to the volcano. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park encompasses Mauna Loa and Kilauea. Hiking up Mauna Loa is a tremendous challenge I went with the more accessible option, exploring the summit of Kilauea. Soon after entering the park and paying the 15 admission (which is good for a week), I came to the caldera, a huge, craterlike depression approximately two and a half miles long and two miles wide. As I approached the guardrail, I noticed ground vents belching enormous puffs of white steam. The view was awe inspiring. In the center of the caldera was the pit crater, a smaller, glowing, caldron of sulfur and smoke. I was reminded of the Eye of Sauron from "The Lord of the Rings." I had a great view of the glowing volcano while being towed back to Hilo after I got two flat tires on my rental car in Kau. During the long, slow drive, the driver of the tow truck, Larry Carvalho, told me about his life and family. He was kind to me, told me not to worry about the car, and proceeded to take my mind off things with stories of pig hunts, his children and growing up in Mountain View. When he dropped me off, I tried to tip him. Repeatedly. He refused, repeatedly, and told me to take care. He was simply doing his job, to be sure. But that small kindness typified the aloha spirit and encapsulated my experience on the Big Island an easy, casual compassion, welcoming of others, looking simply to live and let live.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The couple married on Jan. 4, 1997 at St. Mary Church in Greenwich, Conn. They have lived in Darien, Conn., for the past 20 years and have a 17 year old son, Leo. "We went to the same high school. I was 15, Chris was a senior. He was funny and had a quick wit. I always thought he was kind of cool," said Mrs. Van Munching, who grew up in Darien. "That summer he got up the nerve to talk to me at the beach and asked if I wanted to see a movie. I wasn't thinking what would happen in the future. It was 1983." That summer they dated. Then he went to college. A few months later, she broke up with him. "I did it over the phone, which wasn't very nice, but I was really young. I didn't want to be a girlfriend. It made me nervous. I liked not having a boyfriend," she said. Since they lived in the same town, they would see each other on holidays. Ten years went by. Both grew up. They lived their lives, dated other people and survived their 20s. "I got to be so many different people from the time I met him to the time I met him again," she said. "I worked out so much stuff and he probably did, too. He didn't have to go through my waiting tables, having purple hair and being in grad school." In December 1995, they saw each other at the Wee Burn Country Club, where both their parents were members. "Chris was so warm and I felt completely comfortable. Our rapport was so natural," she said. "I was charmed by him, and thought, 'What an interesting person.' That night I went home and broke up with the person I'd been dating for six months." That week she sent him a Christmas card. He wrote her back, stating that if she was going to be in Connecticut, they could go to a movie. She came for a visit. They talked all night. A month later they started dating again, this time for real. Eight months later, Mr. Van Munching proposed at Smith's Point, a beach on Nantucket. Five months later they were married. Mrs. Van Munching: Chris is the perfect combination of funny and together. I grew up in an insane family where we flew by the seats of our pants. Chris always has it together. He knows where everything is, and that's incredibly comforting. I could be 100 percent myself with him. I couldn't do that with others in the past. I've learned that sometimes, somebody can bring incredible love out of you. We have short hand because we had known each other, and where we came from. He knows my crazy and I know his, and we're still O.K. with that. He's the most thoughtful, warm and sensitive person. We complement each other. I'm introverted; he's extroverted. He keeps charge of the calendar. He makes the social plans with the wives in town because he knows that overwhelms me. He tells me when to show up and the appropriate ensemble. He anticipates things. He reads my signals without me having to say it. He knows when I'm hungry or guilty, when I haven't seen my parents enough. Marriage taught me it's the small kindness that you do for each other that makes a huge difference. They accumulate. You might think they're insignificant, but they add up and make this big thing. He sets the table. He knows my favorite sandwich and sometimes just shows up with it. He draws a bath for me. I didn't think I would need someone. I thought I'd be alone. Not in a sad way, just because I'm independent. I never thought there was a missing piece, but there was. I never thought I would love someone so completely. I'm still surprised by it. He's the only person I could have ended up with. Mr. Van Munching Kim was unlike anyone I'd known. She was sophisticated and worldly. She had a beautiful smile. She still does. Proposing was the best decision I ever made. It was a leap of faith because we are so different. I'm Type A, and she's not. I'm practical and pragmatic; she's more thoughtful, is able to understand people's motivations, and has empathy. I went to school for business; she went for the arts. I'm so grateful we're not both type As or Type Bs. Then we'd never get anything done. Our differences bring out the best in each other. She cooks; I clean. If we both clean then no one cooks. We are not overlapping. We each play to our strengths. We're both strong personalities but no one is pushing to be in charge. That removes all friction and keeps us together. In 21 years we've had only two serious fights. The rest are over wallpaper or dishes, and no one cares at the end of the day. I know there are people who are dismissive of their spouses. We don't do that. We really talk it out and if it's unimportant we let the little details go. Being married has taught me how to be a good person, a good man and a good spouse. When you're single, you act out of your own motivation. We are an us. A single unit. I put our needs and wants ahead of myself, and that has made me grow up and consider things in a much better manner. She is a never ending source of love for me, for our son, for us as a couple. We laugh. A lot. I love to see her laugh. I'll sneak up and say something in a silly voice, or randomly quote movies from the 80s, and that makes her laugh and that makes my life.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Unemployment has fallen, and the stock market has soared. So why has the economic expansion since the recession been so tame, with sluggish productivity and, at least until recently, anemic wage growth? Economists say the answer, to some degree, can be found in a start up slump a decline in the creation of new businesses and a growing understanding of what's behind it. A total of 414,000 businesses were formed in 2015, the latest year surveyed, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday. It was a slight increase from the previous year, but well below the 558,000 companies given birth in 2006, the year before the recession set in. "We're still in a start up funk," said Robert Litan, an economist and antitrust lawyer who has studied the issue. "Obviously the recession had a lot to do with it, but then you're left with the conundrum: Why hasn't there been any recovery?" Many economists say the answer could lie in the rising power of the biggest corporations, which they argue is stifling entrepreneurship by making it easier for incumbent businesses to swat away challengers or else to swallow them before they become a serious threat. "You've got rising market power," said Marshall Steinbaum, an economist at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank. "In general, that makes it hard for new businesses to compete with incumbents. Market power is the story that explains everything." That argument comes at a potent political moment. Populists on both the left and right have responded to growing public unease about the corporate giants that increasingly dominate their online and offline lives. Polling data from Gallup and other organizations shows a long running decline in confidence in banks and other big businesses a concern not likely to abate after high profile data breaches at Equifax and other companies. The start up slump has far reaching implications. Small businesses in general are often cited as an exemplar of economic dynamism. But it is start ups and particularly the small subset of companies that grow quickly that are key drivers of job creation and innovation, and have historically been a ladder into the middle class for less educated workers and immigrants. Perhaps most significant, start ups play a critical role in making the economy as a whole more productive, as they invent new products and approaches, forcing existing businesses to compete or fall by the wayside. In 1980, according to the Census Bureau data, roughly one in eight companies had been founded in the past year; by 2015, that ratio had fallen to fewer than one in 12. The downward trend cuts across regions and industries and, at least since 2000, includes even the beating heart of American entrepreneurship, high tech. Although the overall slump dates back more than 30 years, economists are most concerned about a more recent trend. In the 1980s and 1990s, the entrepreneurial slowdown was concentrated in sectors such as retail, where corner stores and regional brands were being subsumed by national chains. That trend, though often painful for local communities, wasn't necessarily a drag on productivity more generally. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Since about 2000, however, the slowdown has spread to parts of the economy more often associated with high growth entrepreneurship, including the technology sector. That decline has coincided with a period of weak productivity growth in the United States as a whole, a trend that has in turn been implicated in the patterns of fitful wage gains and sluggish economic growth since the recession. Recent research has suggested that the decline in entrepreneurship, and in other measures of business dynamism, is one cause of the prolonged stagnation in productivity. "We've got lots of pieces now that say dynamism has gone down a lot since 2000," said John Haltiwanger, a University of Maryland economist who has done much of the pioneering work in the field. "Start ups have gone down a lot since 2000, especially in the high tech sectors, and there are increasingly strong links to productivity." What is behind the decline in entrepreneurship is less clear. Economists and other experts have pointed to a range of possible explanations: The aging of the baby boom generation has left fewer Americans in their prime business starting years. The decline of community banks and the collapse of the market for home equity loans may have made it harder for would be entrepreneurs to get access to capital. Increased regulation, at both the state and federal levels, may be particularly burdensome for new businesses that lack well staffed compliance departments. Those and other factors could well play a role, but none can fully explain the decline. More recently, economists especially but not exclusively on the left have begun pointing the finger at big business, and in particular at the handful of companies that increasingly dominate many industries. The evidence is largely circumstantial: The slump in entrepreneurship has coincided with a period of increasing concentration in nearly every major industry. Research from Mr. Haltiwanger and several co authors has found that the most productive companies are growing more slowly than in the past, a hint that competitive pressures aren't forcing companies to react as quickly to new innovations. A recent working paper from economists at Princeton and University College London found that American companies are increasingly able to demand prices well above their costs which according to standard economic theory would lead new companies to enter the market. Yet that isn't happening. "If we're in an era of excessive profits, in competitive markets we would see record firm entry, but we see the opposite," said Ian Hathaway, an economist who has studied the issue. That, Mr. Hathaway said, suggests that the market is not truly competitive that existing companies have found ways to block competitors. Experts also point to anecdotal examples that suggest that the rise of big businesses could be squelching competition. YouTube, Instagram and hundreds of lower profile start ups chose to sell out to industry heavyweights like Google and Facebook rather than try to take them on directly. The tech giants have likewise been accused of using the power of their platforms to favor their own offerings over those of competitors.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Constance Wu stars in what may be this summer's guilty pleasure, the film adaptation of "Crazy Rich Asians," which will be in theaters Aug. 15. She is also known for her role as Jessica Huang in the TV comedy series "Fresh Off the Boat." Off screen, Ms. Wu, who is 36 and is from Richmond, Va., would love to channel Jennifer Lopez in beauty choices, at least. Find out why she has "flighty" issues with her hair and why it's all about the J.Lo glow. First thing: I chug a bunch of water, and then I usually do something pretty simple. You know those Neutrogena makeup wipes? I use either those or just water. I follow that with Drunk Elephant vitamin C serum. I shop at Sephora a lot because they're really cool about letting you try things out. This was a recommended product there, so I gave it a go and loved it. Then I use La Mer Moisturizing Soft Cream. The first time I heard about La Mer was in middle school, and I read that J.Lo used it. I didn't always use it, but once I started making money, I was like, "I can actually afford to treat myself." To me, skin care is a pleasure. Depending on the day, I might use sunscreen. I used to use Neutrogena Ultra Sheer, but then I read that physical sunscreens are better than chemical ones, and I switched to one by La Roche Posay. I have a whole other routine at night. If I've had a shoot and I'm wearing makeup, I do different types of cleanser. I use SK II oil cleanser that takes the makeup off and after that, I use the Clearasil face wash. Seriously. I've been using it since I was a teenager. And I'm really into these Alpha Beta peels by Dr. Dennis Gross. If I want to be really glow y the next day, I definitely use them. I follow that with the Drunk Elephant serum, and sometimes I use a prescription retinoid called tretinoin. If I do the peel, though, I skip that. I won't use both. I also like the Shiseido Glow Revival line a lot. I use the serum, the lotion and the eye cream. If I have an event or something, I sometimes do a face mask before. There's this brand called Naruko. I discovered it when I was filming "Crazy Rich Asians." Face masks are relatively new in the U.S. In Asia, you can buy them all kinds at the local drugstore. I was at a drugstore in Singapore buying toothpaste, and they had a sampler pack of face masks with the Naruko ones I love so much. Makeup is a kind of mood ring. One day you can be really stripped down and natural, and on other days you want to do an orange lip. Usually I use the Cle de Peau concealer for my dark circles. And I always do some kind of blush. My blushes rotate depending on my mood and what I'm wearing. Sometimes I do a powder blush from Laura Mercier, and sometimes I do a HD cream blush from Make Up for Ever. But then today, for example, I'm wearing Benetint. I do brown eyeliner on my top lash line. And I like lip color that mimics my natural color it's a pinky mauve. The one I'm using now is by Charlotte Tilbury. I do like having a lip liner sometimes, and I have one by Laura Mercier in Potpourri. I line just outside my top lip before filling it in. I take a lot of inspiration from J.Lo in that sense. She looks so great. Mascara irritates my eyes. I get lash extensions now it's easier. I try to get really natural looking ones that are thin and don't really curl. I don't want to look like those dolls that blink. I don't wear fragrance. Fragrance shopping is so overwhelming. I don't even know how to begin. My natural hair is a dark, dark brown, very shiny, very straight and very full. I have so much hair. I've gone through four different hair colors this year. It wasn't because of any roles. It was because of my flighty personality. I took the summer off from work. Because I knew I wasn't going to be on camera for several months, I thought, "I'm going to just play around." I was pink, then I was jet black, then I was blond, and now I'm kind of dark blond light brown.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
THE AFTERLIFE OF STARS By Joseph Kertes 256 pp. Little, Brown Company. 26. In late October 1956, after seven years under oppressive Soviet rule, Hungary's students and writers initiated a revolution that looked at first to Western eyes, at least like a swift victory for democracy. Revolutionaries pulled down a 26 foot high statue of Stalin and held mass demonstrations at the Parliament building. When Soviet tanks began firing into the crowds, the people's fervor only increased. Within days, the Hungarian Army had split into factions and the government crumbled. The Soviets announced they would call back their troops. In an editorial, this newspaper declared that the lie of Communism had fractured and expressed a cautious hope that the world might soon enter an age without a Cold War. But a few days later, the Kremlin reversed its decision to let the new government stand. Soviet forces surged into Budapest, and free Hungary began to fall. At the beginning of "The Afterlife of Stars," Joseph Kertes's devastating yet unnervingly funny new novel, the young narrator, Robert Beck (who is, he informs us, exactly 9.8 years old), happens upon a scene of counterrevolutionary carnage at Budapest's Oktogon Square: From each of its eight lampposts hangs a Hungarian soldier. The one who captures Robert's attention looks down with "evergreen eyes," his auburn hair "parted and brilliantined so that it shone even at this distance." Kertes knows whereof he speaks: When he was 4 years old he witnessed the hanging of soldiers at this same square, hours before his own family fled Hungary. But it's not every writer who can render a scene like this with such verisimilitude so many years after the fact. That image the meticulously coifed, green eyed dead man, a kind of human analog to the red, white and green Hungarian flag appears again and again in Robert's memory, an inescapable reminder of personal and national tragedy. But Robert and his 13 year old brother, the ardent, headstrong Attila, never avert their eyes from the horrors around them. In fact, they do just the opposite, running toward danger, toward knowledge, not with morbid curiosity but with an insatiable need to understand the world. It's Attila who drives this quest, towing his brother along on a leash of mock endearments ("My alabaster darling," "my birdling," "my little imbecile"). Attila's inquiries range in scale from the minuscule (Why is semen such a "drab, pearly" color when it has such an important job?) to the cosmic (Why did God bother to create the universe when he could foresee all the disasters ahead?). That last question isn't an idle one. Attila and his family, Holocaust survivors, have already experienced enough hardship to challenge any cohesive theology. Now, in the aftermath of the revolution, they become refugees, fleeing toward an unimaginable future. The family's plan is to travel through Austria and France, then cross the ocean to Canada. By the time they make it to Paris and the home of the narrator's great aunt, an opera singer whose hands were horribly disfigured during the war, Robert hazards the hope that the Beck family has managed at last to sidestep history. But the opposite turns out to be true. The family's personal history is a fraught one (you can read about it in Kertes's previous novel, "Gratitude"), and it exerts a black hole's gravitational pull. In a moonlit solarium, Aunt Hermina tells Robert the story of her torture by the Nazis. And in a gingerbread trimmed shed behind the house, a black leather chest yields mementos of the war. Its letters and diaries shed light on the story of a cousin, Paul Beck, who served as Raoul Wallenberg's right hand man in Budapest and was responsible for the Beck family's survival. Like Wallenberg, Paul disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Attila now becomes obsessed with learning his cousin's fate and enlists Robert in his quest for the truth.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Jupiter's Great Red Spot is not only big and red. It's also hot. Using a telescope on Earth, astronomers peered at infrared emissions from Jupiter and found that the temperature of the upper atmosphere, 350 to 600 miles above the giant swirling storm, averages 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. That finding, reported on Wednesday in a paper published in the journal Nature, is the latest piece of a puzzle that has been confusing planetary scientists since 1973 when NASA's Pioneer 10 spacecraft flew by and took the first temperature measurements of the solar system's biggest planet. By their calculations, scientists expected that the warmth of sunlight impinging on Jupiter should heat the upper atmosphere to a cool 100 degrees. Instead, the temperature was about 1,000 degrees. Scientists searched for something to solve this planetary "energy crisis." An obvious suspect was Jupiter's gargantuan auroras, the glow of charged particles accelerated along the magnetic field into the polar regions. Indeed, temperatures in the upper atmosphere at the top and bottom of Jupiter are around 1,700 degrees, fitting that explanation. But as displayed by Jupiter's colorful bands, the winds on the planet blow east west, not north south. "No one has quite worked out how you distribute that energy from the polar regions down to the Equator," said Steve Miller, a professor of planetary science and science communication at University College London in England who was not involved in the research. "There's a lot of energy there. Distributing it has been a problem." Dr. O'Donoghue and his colleagues used the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii to focus on emissions of a particular ion in Jupiter's atmosphere a clump of three hydrogen atoms that is missing an electron, making it positively charged. The brightness of the emissions tells the temperature, and over the Great Red Spot, the infrared emissions were particularly bright. That suggests the heat is coming from below. The spot is the largest storm in the solar system, some 10,000 miles wide, and it has persisted for centuries, although it is shrinking. (Historical observations put it at 25,000 miles wide in the 1800s.) The scientists propose that the energy from the storm's turbulence is rising in the form of sound like waves and then crashing in the tenuous upper atmosphere. The same effect, to a smaller extent, could explain the overall heating, they said. "They're producing some very plausible, if not 100 percent, convincing evidence that this is what is happening, at least above the Great Red Spot," Dr. Miller said. Amy A. Simon, a senior scientist for planetary atmospheres research at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., described the work as an "interesting theory." But she added, "some caution is warranted," because methane glows at the same wavelength, potentially producing misleading temperature readings. NASA's Juno spacecraft, which arrived at Jupiter this month, will try to take a closer look at the Great Red Spot, too, but its instruments are designed more to study the deep interior of the planet, not the upper atmosphere. "In our opinion, it's a huge mystery," Michael Janssen, who leads a microwave instrument on Juno, said of the Great Red Spot. The microwave measurements will tell the temperature and amount of water and help determine how far down the storm descends into the atmosphere. Dr. Janssen said the storm could be driven by water pushed up in the atmosphere, condensing, forming clouds and falling back down. Juno will pass close to the spot in November. "We'll be able to pick up some of the structure in the western side of the Great Red Spot," Dr. Janssen said. "We're hoping to get at least some visibility." Then on Aug. 9 next year, on Juno's 23rd science orbit, the Great Red Spot "should be within view of our instrument," Dr. Janssen said, although that depends how far the spot drifts between now and then.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
LOOKING back on a year's worth of columns, two major themes popped up: perennial consumer concerns and the changing world of work. Robocalls exemplified the first theme. While anyone who has a phone knows that the battle against these automated calls promising a great mortgage deal, say, or terrific energy savings is far from over, government and entrepreneurs are now mounting a multifront attack. In September, 39 state attorneys general requested that the Federal Communications Commission look into whether telephone carriers can use existing technology to filter telemarketing and robocalls on behalf of consumers. "We need more tools in the arsenal if we hope to combat this growing criminal industry," said Indiana's attorney general, Greg Zoeller, who was one of the signers of the letter. The commission is asking the public to comment on this issue; the comment period is open until Jan. 23. The commission has long prohibited call blocking that could be abusive or anti competitive, such as stopping calls from other carriers, but has allowed it in rare circumstances. Depending on the comments, the commission could decide to let carriers in certain circumstances block telemarketing calls and robocalls if customers request it. Individual consumers, of course, have every right to use whatever tools they can caller ID or loud whistles to avoid these maddening calls. A Feb. 22 column featured one, Nomorobo. Aaron Foss, a software developer from Long Island, won a contest the Federal Trade Commission sponsored last year to find innovative ways to attack the robocall problem. Nomorobo is a free service that uses a simultaneous ringing feature available on most phone systems. Once a consumer signs up on nomorobo.com, the system answers calls that appear to be from telemarketers and then hangs up before the home or office phone picks up. If a call that is not from a telemarketer is rerouted accidentally, a recording says, "you have been identified as a robocaller" and asks the caller to enter a two digit number. If this is done correctly, the caller is put through. In February, Mr. Foss said he had signed up about 68,000 users and blocked over a million calls. Nearly 11 months later, he said he had 170,000 users and blocked 13.5 million calls. Our household is one of those users, and we have found Nomorobo prevents probably 80 percent of such calls. The system works only with landlines and voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, services. Mr. Foss said he was excited that three VoIP carriers Sonic, Ooma and 1 VoIP were paying him to use Nomorobo. Besides Nomorobo, the state attorneys general in their letter mentioned other blocking technologies currently available, such as Call Control for Android and BlackBerry smartphones and Telemarketing Guard for Canadian consumers. The Federal Trade Commission also continued its efforts this year to tap the knowledge of techies by throwing out a challenge at the Def Con 22 hacking convention in Las Vegas in August. Called "Zapping Rachel," in reference to the ubiquitous robocaller "Rachel from Cardholder Services," the contest enlisted participants to compete in one of three phases aimed at identifying, analyzing and stopping robocalls. Three winners each received about 3,000. Robocalls may be one of the most irritating parts of life, but estate planning, the subject of a Sept. 6 column, is one of the most dreaded. Lots of readers found the published list of needed documents helpful, but made a few suggestions for additions. The column advised that among the many necessary documents should be a list of passwords and logins. Since passwords should be changed often, however, the list may be out of date almost immediately. Using a password manager such as 1Password or LastPass may be an option, some readers said. These can be protected by a long phrase that is secure but easy to remember. "Some states have very quick probate processes," she wrote. "Others like California can take a minimum of six months to a year if you are lucky, and are expensive and cumbersome." Finally, it seemed worthwhile to revisit some of the people featured in one of the first columns of the year, on the challenges of switching careers. When we last left Trent Brown and his wife, Janell, they were running One Sweet Slice, a cake and cupcake store in the Salt Lake City area, and had just opened a second. They were also raising four children. While the bakery was receiving high marks from customers and winning national awards, financially Mr. Brown was very nervous. He worried that opening a second shop had overextended the couple, and he decided to return to corporate America. He had been laid off in 2010 as a sales representative but had just been hired as an interactive sales manager. And now? "Things are still tough, but we're in such a better place than last year," Mr. Brown said. "The revenues are staying consistent, but the cost of labor and goods is going down." That's because he and Ms. Brown have put in place more checks and balances. The cost of goods is now no more than 25 percent of revenue, and payroll costs are about 28 percent. "Before, we were looking at this on a monthly or quarterly basis," Mr. Brown said. "Now we watch it daily." Ms. Brown added: "So we know if we can't afford to buy some ingredient or inventory and need to use what we have in stock." Mr. Brown is still working as a sales manager and does the marketing and finances for One Sweet Slice on the side. And Ms. Brown is trying to find balance. "The first two years I worked 60 to 80 hours a week. Now it's 40 hours a week," she said. No third shop is in the plans at this point. In that same column, Karin Hazelkorn of San Francisco told of taking a buyout from her job in marketing and business development with Cisco Systems and her hopes of creating a partnership between textile artisans and fashion houses. That didn't work out, so over the year she switched tracks, combining her marketing and business skills with her love of textiles by working as a consultant with textile artists and interior designers. She also sits on museum boards and is helping put together a show on textiles made from pineapple fibers from the Philippines.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
James McAvoy's Morpheus is an aural delight: moody, subdued, his words delivered with a stirring gravitas, like velvet to the ear. Kat Dennings pitches a plucky, youthful Death, but sometimes reads too juvenile. Likewise, Michael Sheen's a charming Lucifer, but he occasionally loses his grasp on the noble bearing of the leader of Hell. Justin Vivian Bond purrs seductively as the cruel, mischievous Desire, and Riz Ahmed provides an effortless magnetism to the dangerous nightmare of the Corinthian. Leading this parade of vocal talents is Gaiman himself, who intimately knows the lifts, dips and turns of his work, and how to convey them. Gaiman is a storyteller not only on the page but before the microphone, his tone always bearing the slightest hint of impish mystery, as though he can't wait to reveal the story's secrets; and yet his pace is steady and patient, as though he's determined not to lose you along the way. Hannigan's score is inviting and fanciful, reminiscent of the work of John Williams, full of eerie creeps and triumphant swells. And the sound effects the puttering of a car engine, the shuffling of linen sheets surround the listener as though we are present in the scene. This also means the story's horrors are viscerally real: the fleshy, wet sound of a nurse's head falling off her neck; the gruesome thud of a man hammering a nail into the back of his hand. The audio version of Gaiman's nightmares is more unforgiving than the comic: You may not actually witness the violence of the ice pick, the poker or the pocketknife, but thanks to the voices and effects, you can't help hearing them. Though the adaptation adheres closely to Gaiman's original writing, it has to fill in the gaps that arise when translating a visual medium to an aural one. Whereas the comics contain illustrations that provide a language all their own, the audio version must fall back wholly on the text, and deliver more. In this case, the task simply gives Gaiman an opportunity to do more of what he does best: bring images to life. Describing a demon named Azazel, he calls her "a floating absence, a black amoebic nothingness filled with myriad eyes and mouths." But the script cannot always talk itself out of the pitfalls of this kind of adaptation. Gaiman's series indulges his love affair with broad, expansive scopes and narrative indirection. He loves to approach his main story lines from the outside in, beginning with ancillary vignettes and side characters, some of whom appear again and others of whom are gone as quickly as they arrive. These shifts are easier to track in the comics, by the visual cues and reminders. The audio version tries to do the same with the repetition of sound effects and (sometimes awkwardly incorporated) exposition, but the world of "The Sandman" is so large and elaborately knotted that newcomers may feel a bit lost.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Greg Nicotero learned about horror filmmaking and special effects on the set of the film "Creepshow." Now he's making a new version, as a six episode series on Shudder. Before he made his name figuring out creative ways for zombies to stalk people, or for s erial killers to dismember people, or for cannibal piranhas to eat people, Greg Nicotero had plans to eventually take over his father's medical practice . Then George Romero called. It was 198 1. Romero, who had galvanized the horror genre with gritty, socially aware films like "Night of the Living Dead," was filming "Creepshow" near Nicotero's home in Pittsburgh. Stephen King, who already had multiple hit novels to his name, had written the script, his first. The makeup and effects master Tom Savini, famous in the business for his work on movies like "Dawn of the Dead" and "Friday the 13th," was doing the blood and guts and monsters. Nicotero, who was still in high school, had stayed in touch with Romero, a fellow Pittsburgher, since meeting him on a family vacation in Rome. Now the director wanted to know: Was he interested in a set visit? "Living in Pittsburgh, I never imagined that the film industry or special effects or doing monsters or any of this stuff I never even knew that that was a job," Nicotero, 56, said in a recent phone interview. "To me, it was a hobby." This one he simply calls "my baby." Nicotero's timing seems auspicious, given the wave of '80s horror nostalgia currently sweeping pop culture. The Netflix hit "Stranger Things" openly cribs from vintage King and by extension, Savini and his heirs. The killer doll Chucky was reanimated in cinemas this summer. The new season of "American Horror Story," which began last week , is set in a summer camp in 1984. The new "Creepshow" is, of course, a tribute to the original and its 1987 sequel. But those films were themselves tributes to midcentury comic books like "Tales from the Crypt," which connoisseurs like Romero, King and Savini grew up reading. The first film was structured to convey the page turning immediacy of a comic book, divided into five short, discrete tales taken from a fictional comic called Creepshow. King's son Joe, then 8 years old, plays a boy who gets in trouble for reading it. "It's celebrating horror's ability to be so important and desirable for young viewers and readers who know that they're doing something their parents probably would not approve of," said Adam Lowenstein, a University of Pittsburgh professor who has written extensively about the genre's history. The movie was child centered, he argued, without being childish. "That's an important tradition in the genre to honor," he said. "An important way to understand the original 'Creepshow' is it's King and Romero honoring the children they were, and the ways that they got energized and electrified by the genre in the first place." Nicotero, in turn, found multiple ways for his series to honor the film that had energized him. One was by hiring his friend and former mentor Savini, whom he first met on the set of "Creepshow," as a director proof, as Savini put it, that the student had truly become the master. "It completely turned around: He became the teacher," said Savini, 72, describing his experience on set. "I wanted to impress him; I wanted to please him. So getting his stamp of approval, or his suggestions I listened to everything he said." Another was by emphasizing short form storytelling: Episodes are segmented, each comprising two roughly 20 minute stories. Based on the premiere (the only episode provided to journalists in advance), the show preserves the film's gleefully over the top gross outs. The first segment, adapted from a Stephen King story , includes a lot of flesh eating a "Creepshow" tradition. The second stars a severed head. It also preserves some of Romero's formal devices, such as the sudden shifts in color, or the one in which the camera scans a comic book, then dissolves into a live action freeze frame. "I really felt that what was critical was recreating that idea that you're picking up a comic book and you're reading a comic book," Nicotero said. Still, he didn't want to confine himself too much, he added, pointing to the freedom that came from doing short segments with a variety of writers and casts. "The great thing about it is, there are no rules," he said. "You have a different experience every time you watch an episode." One of those episodes includes an adaptation of "By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain," a story by that same son of King's who appeared in the 1982 film known today as the best selling horror author Joe Hill. From there, the string of connections loops around again: "Champlain" was directed by Savini, with whom Hill spent formative time on the set as a child. Savini, Hill said, had been his "definition of cool" when they met, his "first rock star." "He had the leather jacket, and he had these eyebrows like Spock I sat there and I'd watch him artistically disfigure movie stars and create creatures," Hill said in an interview this spring tied to "NOS4A2," an AMC series based on his novel. He recalled being sent to hang out in Savini's trailer for 10 days the closest thing the production had to on set child care, he joked. Between King, Savini and Hill, any one of them might justly call the original "my 'Creepshow'" to say nothing of Romero, who died two years ago. Bringing them all back under one tent, in person or in spirit, put a lot of pressure on Nicotero. So did the fact that this is Shudder's first original long form scripted series. "It was crazy, man. There were nights I would wake up at three in the morning; I didn't know how I was going to make it through," Nicotero said. "I felt the eyes on me, and all I could think about was, I wanted to make people proud and I wanted to carry on the legacy of what George and Stephen created." It helped to have Savini involved. They've been tight since Savini made Nicotero his assistant on "Day of the Dead," several years after they met on the "Creepshow" set. Amid the playful, improvisational climate Romero created, the two played pranks, horsed around. ("I think I ran him over with a golf cart," Savini said.) Romero gave Nicotero a small role in the film that involved severing and reanimating his head. That early mentorship kick started Nicotero's career he eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he started an effects company that has designed and supervised makeup effects in movies like "From Dusk Till Dawn," "Piranha 3D" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning." Savini stayed in Pittsburgh, where he runs a program teaching students makeup effects. But the two remained close, visiting often. "I'm very proud of Greg, and he's really good," Savini said. "I believe he would have all the success if he'd never even met me." Nicotero modestly disagrees, insisting at every opportunity on Savini's enormous influence on his career. But becoming a showrunner had empowered him to offer more than thanks. Despite Savini's vast experience doing effects in recent decades for directors like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, he hadn't directed anything major since his remake of "Night of the Living Dead" (1990). When Nicotero offered him a script, Savini leapt at the opportunity. "Forget the money, you know, it was worth it just to get Greg's approval and then for him to trust me," Savini said. "He trusted me to still have my mojo." For both men, their collaboration, like the entire "Creepshow" reboot, was clearly meaningful a fitting tribute to Romero and their friendship. But for Nicotero, it also just made sense. "To me, the modern horror genre is defined, in part, by Tom Savini and George Romero, so I couldn't imagine doing 'Creepshow' without Tom." he said. "And for me to be able to turn around and offer him this opportunity an opportunity that he really had wanted to pursue that really meant the world to me."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
"No one dies in New York without my speaking," Fran Lebowitz said, arriving for lunch with Bill Maher in late June, a few hours before speaking at a memorial service that afternoon. "That's how I know I'm immortal. Who would speak at all those services without me?" Under different circumstances, Ms. Lebowitz, 66, a writer and humorist, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, might have presided over a memorial service for Mr. Maher's television show, "Real Time With Bill Maher," a popular weekly talk show hosted by the comedian and political satirist on HBO. Their lunch date came just a few weeks after Mr. Maher's much decried use of a racial epithet while telling a joke on his show. Many called for its cancellation. The guest Mr. Maher was interviewing on that show, Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, later tweeted his regret at not condemning its use immediately. ("Me just cringing last night wasn't good enough," he said.) But a public apology by the host and a subsequent episode of "Real Time" that examined his error kept it on the air. Mr. Maher, 61, who just received his 40th Emmy nomination, is no stranger to controversy. His previous show, "Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher," was canceled by ABC in 2002 after he made allegedly insensitive remarks about 9/11. Since the inception of "Real Time," he has brought sarcasm and independent thinking to his critiques of Republican and Democratic politics, and especially to the administration of Donald J. Trump. (Early in July, he stirred the waters again with a questionable joke linking North Korea's drive for nuclear weapons with the presumably Korean manicurists at his nail salon.) BM And now that's not the case. Teachers have miserable jobs because parents always take the side of the child. Their perfect, genius child. And if the kid isn't doing well, it must be the teacher's fault. And when we see these videos of college kids screaming at teachers remember the one at Yale? Kids screaming at professors about Halloween costumes. It's a Halloween costume! FL Or at Princeton, where they want to change the name of buildings. When I saw it on the news, the protest was full of black women. I thought: Girls go to Princeton now. When I was that age, girls couldn't go to Princeton. Hardly any black people or Jews could go to Princeton, girls or boys. But they don't know that, so they never think, "I'm pretty lucky to be here." PG But you can't be saying we've leveled the playing field, that minorities are now getting a fair shot, because black girls get into Princeton? PG Can you distinguish this episode from the one after 9/11, when your show on ABC was canceled? Then, you agreed with a guest who said the 9/11 hijackers weren't cowards. Frankly, willingness to blow yourself up isn't my idea of cowardice, either. It may be crazy or evil. I hope I don't get fired for this. BM Part of the difference, as Fran says, is that I was on a network with sponsors. And when sponsors pull out, the network has no choice. But also, the 9/11 statement had meaning behind it. The recent thing was just a mistake. I should not have used that word, even reaching for a joke. FL The worst thing about this is that there's always outrage over people in show business, who have no actual power. They're entertainers. We would prefer that they agree with us, and do the right thing. But moral outrage should be reserved for Congress or the Supreme Court. To me, the fact that people can't tell the difference between these things is why we have Donald Trump as president. People want to be entertained 24 hours a day. And they're seeking from entertainment what they should be seeking from other branches of life. BM You can tell he still thinks he's in the real estate world. The way he tried to influence Jim Comey, that's something you do to a housing inspector. You call him up over and over, "I know there are rats in the building, but can't you let it go?" PG Both of you spend a lot of time on the road, doing speaking engagements and stand up. BM When you're a comedian, there's nothing greater than comede ing, getting up on a stage and making people laugh. It's also a great benefit for doing "Real Time" because I see the country. People talk about "flyover states." I land in them. I do shows in them. I talk to people, and I think I have a greater understanding of America because of that. FL I wish I had less of an understanding. I already know the country too well. BM It's a bitter pill that the Trump voter is my age, my race and my gender. BM And I knew they were asses in high school. FL I am so tired of hearing about what the Trump voters want. I don't care what they want. How's that? And you know what? We do know what they want. They want a Confederate flag. We all know what this is about. I'm tired of hearing people, particularly men, explain to me what Hillary Clinton did wrong. Donald Trump didn't win because he did something right; he won because he did something wrong. We always knew you could win that way appealing to the worst. You're just not supposed to win the presidency that way.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
If anyone thought the Yankees' acquisition of Troy Tulowitzki, which was completed on Friday, was going to provide some clarity about the rest of their winter plans particularly the pursuit of the infielder Manny Machado well, good luck with that. General Manager Brian Cashman, in a conference call with reporters on Friday, said his scouts had been so impressed with Tulowitzki in two workouts that they plan to turn the shortstop job over to him until Didi Gregorius returns from Tommy John surgery, whether that is in June, July or August. Tulowitzki has not played since 2017. As for whether the signing of Tulowitzki, who agreed to a one year, minimum salary contract, takes the Yankees out of contention for Machado, Cashman said: "I can't say what it would take us out of. But I will say we're going in with a commitment level to try Troy Tulowitzki at shortstop." The Yankees are not inclined to go near the type of 10 year, 300 million contract that Machado is seeking, but if his market turns out to be less than robust he has met with only two other teams, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Chicago White Sox he could still be in the team's plans at third base. Cashman said he had continued to speak with Machado's agent, Dan Lozano, but did not characterize the conversations or say when they had taken place.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
This story is from our archives. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. A slithering carpet of 75,000 snakes in a space the size of a living room. It's hard to imagine wanting to get close to such a scene, but every year it happens, and visitors from around the world attend the unusual reptilian display in the remote hamlet of Narcisse in Manitoba, Canada. The peak of the "emergence," as the province's website calls the unusual event, is expected this weekend. Over the past week and a half, guests to the wildlife area have had hints of what's to come. Thousands of red sided garter snakes have gradually awakened from an eight month nap in their subterranean limestone lairs. They tumble about the craggy landscape in tangled knots with a singular focus: reproduction. "When they wake up literally after eight months underground, I don't know about you, but I'd want to get a Big Mac or a meal," said Bob Mason, a reproductive biologist at Oregon State University who studies these snakes. But the first thing on the snake's agenda is sex. The males pour out of the dens first and wait for the females to slowly trickle out over the course of a few weeks. "Once she gets up off the floor, she's sort of swarmed by all of them," said Doug Collicutt, a local biologist. In this sea of snakes, a female isn't easy to find, even though she's three to four times bigger. At times, the ratio of males to females is 10,000 to 1. "Imagine trying to find a slightly bigger piece of spaghetti in a colander of spaghetti, and it's moving," Dr. Mason said. So the snakes use scent. A female secretes pheromones from her skin, luring dozens to hundreds of males that try to court her by rubbing their chins along her back and flicking their tongues. She ultimately decides when she is ready to mate by a mysterious mechanism called cryptic female choice. The closest male wins and leaves a stinky plug inside her that tells others to back off. She can wait a couple days for the plug to dissolve and mate with another snake, or she can slither off into the swamps to feed and give live birth to her babies in August. (In case you're wondering, the female can store sperm until she's healthy enough to reproduce, said Dr. Mason, who documented a female snake who gave birth seven years after mating.) By June, there are no snakes at the dens, but they all return in September except the babies. Of the 250,000 snakes born each summer, not one can be found in the den that fall. For centuries, some thought they stuck out the winter in giant ant hills, but Dr. Mason believes the creatures freeze and come back to life like wood frogs. He has no evidence, but said he hoped to prove himself right before he retires.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
After Andrew Behrendt received his Ph.D. in history in 2016, he hoped to land a full time job as a professor. But he has applied for tenure track faculty jobs continuously with no luck. So Dr. Behrendt, who is 34, teaches a wide variety of history classes as an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh. The pay is generally 4,000 a course. Doing that alone would make it hard to make ends meet, he said, and he earns the bulk of his income as a staff member at the University Center for International Studies. Dr. Behrendt, whose wife teaches at a charter school, said his lower salary made it hard to save for a house or start a family especially since he is also struggling to pay off his student loan debt. He has considered looking for work outside academia, perhaps in government or the nonprofit sector. But he loves teaching, and "I've spent the last 10 years of my life training to do something relatively specific," he said. "Trying to rebrand is an exhausting thought." So Dr. Behrendt is trying a different approach. He is among a group of University of Pittsburgh faculty members exploring unionization as a way to press for changes that include higher adjunct salaries. It is working with the United Steelworkers, which is also based in Pittsburgh. The group is in the process of determining whether it has enough support among 4,000 faculty members (both tenured and nontenured) to proceed with collective bargaining. A similar effort involving graduate students is further along. Across the nation, labor unions are stepping in to try to win better pay and job security for part time faculty. As universities sit across the bargaining table from union groups, they may face tough decisions on reallocating their costs and giving up some flexibility in their course offerings. (Through its Media Relations department, the University of Pittsburgh administration declined to comment on the organizing effort.) Tenure track positions are shrinking at colleges and universities. As a result, people with advanced degrees have found themselves in lower paying adjunct positions indefinitely. And that has led to a full blown crisis, said Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, a group that formed nearly 10 years ago to address issues faced by adjuncts and other nontenured faculty. Too many adjunct professors cannot make a living wage through teaching, Ms. Maisto said. In fact, one quarter of part time faculty are on public assistance, according to a 2015 report from the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Sometimes adjuncts are not assigned courses until days before a course begins, Ms. Maisto said, or a class may be canceled at the last minute and given to a tenured faculty member. Most adjuncts do not have health benefits. They may also lack access to professional development funds and a private space to meet with students or store their belongings, she said. "All of these conditions affect the quality of teaching and convey the idea that adjuncts are substandard and unimportant," she said. "It's a very precarious employment situation on lots of different levels, and our concern is what that does to the quality of education." About half of the nation's higher education faculty work part time, according to government data. That number rises to about two thirds if other nontenured positions such as lecturers are included. Depending on the institution, adjunct pay can range from under 2,000 a class to 6,000 and above. A full course load is considered to be three classes a semester. Some adjuncts are teaching as many six classes a semester, driving between different campuses, and taking odd jobs to make ends meet, Ms. Maisto said. At one time several years ago, Susan Harper of Dallas was teaching five classes at four separate institutions as an adjunct, for as little as 1,900 a class and no benefits. Her income was so low that she qualified for financial assistance from a drug maker for her prescriptions. To bring in more money, she took odd jobs such as freelance editing, house sitting and reading tarot cards at parties, she said. When she was in graduate school in the late 1990s, it was reasonable to expect that she could land a tenure track position, Dr. Harper said. But by the time she received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology in 2005, that expectation had changed. With 200,000 in student debt and no health insurance, Dr. Harper decided this year to take a full time job, with benefits, as an editor of scholarly publications. She is still teaching a course online as an adjunct, but does not think she will return full time to academia or try for a tenure track position. "They know they can exploit you for 1,900 a semester," she said, "so why would they hire you?" At public and private institutions combined, more than 20 percent of part time faculty are unionized, according to the most recent data available from a collective bargaining research center at Hunter College, of the City University of New York. And that number is growing, with the most robust activity occurring at private institutions because of differing labor laws, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the center. At the private Siena College, a recent labor agreement was an acknowledgment that "adjuncts are an important part of our community," said Chuck Seifert, dean of the business school. He was the academic representative for the school during talks that lasted for two years. Part time and visiting faculty were represented by the Service Employees International Union. Adjunct faculty were making 2,500 a course per semester at Siena, a college in the Catholic and Franciscan tradition based in Albany. The labor agreement reached last year raises their salaries by 37 percent over three years. The deal also gives preferential course assignments to adjuncts who have taught regularly at the college for three years. And adjuncts now have access to professional development funds and dedicated office space. Siena was able to raise adjunct salaries by achieving financial efficiencies in other areas, said Dr. Seifert, who is also a management professor at the school. Overall costs must always be part of the calculus when setting faculty salaries, he said. At Siena, "we have to develop a long term sustainable financial plan," he said. Given that some colleges in New York offer free tuition, "We don't want to price ourselves out of the market." When it comes to hiring and paying adjuncts, there is a "basic economic supply and demand model in play," Dr. Seifert said. "If you have a Ph.D. in accounting, you can basically get a job in two weeks," he said. But in the liberal arts it's an entirely different story, he said. "You can receive 100 or more applicants for a single position, and that causes a problem." Given market realities, why don't more adjuncts look for work outside academia "That's a perfectly legitimate question," Ms. Maisto said. Some hope to land a tenure track position eventually, but this is becoming much harder to do, she said. Others can't find jobs because, with their advanced degrees, they are considered overqualified for jobs outside academia. Other adjuncts are deeply committed to teaching and refuse to be driven out of academia despite their low salaries, she said. This is true even as the stigma associated with being an adjunct has led to a growing divide between tenure and nontenure track faculty, she said. Fortunately, she said, "there are tenured faculty who have recognized that this is a problem that affects the entire profession, and that we all need to work together as colleagues to try to address it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Daniil Trifonov, the 26 year old Russian pianist, composer and budding superstar, has made intriguing choices for his Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall this season. Last month he proved a sympathetic yet strong collaborator with the baritone Matthias Goerne in Schumann's "Dichterliebe" and Brahms's "Four Serious Songs": The demeaning term "accompanist" never came to mind. But perhaps the most touching evening in the series came on Thursday at Zankel Hall, in a two piano recital Mr. Trifonov shared with his teacher, Sergei Babayan. Mr. Trifonov gave the lead to the Armenian born Mr. Babayan, now an American citizen living in New York who maintains an active international performing career. It is certainly true that not every teacher could hope to hold his own technically in combination with a student as precious as Mr. Trifonov. But the firepower they achieved together is rare among piano duos. They opened with Schumann's Andante and Variations in B flat a lovely work that is not often heard, though Schumann gave it a chance at continued life by eliminating the original two cellos and French horn. Mr. Babayan would state an entire musical sentence as if setting up a challenge for Mr. Trifonov, who would respond with a repeat embellished with a slight, exquisite shift in accentuation or rhythmic twist.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Almost as soon as we landed in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, I set out to make my family miserable. This was not difficult. It was late August, nearing 90 degrees and humid. All I had to do was propose we walk through the streets of the former Saigon to a restaurant for lunch. At first, my wife, Jean, and our daughters Sasha, 7 1/2 , and Sandy, almost 4, were game. The road outside our Airbnb an air conditioned two bedroom, with tile floors and brick walls, carved into a crusty ocher Art Deco building in central District 1 was oddly calm. Shade trees spindled past skeins of electrical wire, while the low plastic chairs of an open air cafe sat neatly in the shade of a long, blank wall. When we came to a busy avenue, we all held hands and stepped bravely into traffic, trusting that motorbikes would swerve around us with unthinking grace. (And they did!) Soon, though, the sun bore down, and we sweated our way along a market street. The rough pavement was at once dusty and damp, the din of shoppers and small trucks inescapable, the ripe scents of fruits and vegetables, fish and pork, as unrestrained as their vivid hues. All about was action, noise, aroma, drama the kind of whirling vortex of energy I feed on. Not so the ladies. There was whining, dawdling, worry. One child had to be carried. (I bore that burden.) It is entirely possible that someone asked, "Are we there yet?" Finally, after 15 endless minutes, we reached a fluorescent lit restaurant, Chi Tuyen, where we sat on blue plastic stools at a lightweight metal table and ordered bun thit nuong, nubs of pork grilled to caramelized sweetness, on a tangle of cool rice noodles, shredded lettuce and herbs like mint and perilla. The kids ate and calmed down, and Sandy played adorably with one of the kittens roaming the restaurant. Outside, rain began to fall, harder and harder, and then even harder. We were trapped, but there was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be. Twenty years earlier, almost to the day, I had moved here to live. Vietnam and the United States had only recently re established diplomatic relations, and I was a fresh college grad embarking on an adult life of adventure in an unknown land. Over the course of a year, I fell in love with the city everyone still called Saigon with the seething chaos of its streets, the head spinning variety of its flavors, the boundless outgoing enthusiasm of its people. In a lifetime of constant travel, Vietnam was my first, truest, deepest love. And yet, though I'd been back to visit a dozen times or more since 1997, I'd never brought my wife and kids, primarily because Jean's family lived in Taiwan, so that island always took precedence on trips to Asia. In the summer of 2016, however, we found ourselves in Taipei for an extended period long enough, I decided, to make a weeklong trip to Vietnam. First we would hit Ho Chi Minh City, then spend two days at a beach resort near Nha Trang nothing overly ambitious, just enough for my family to begin to understand the place that made me who I am. Still, I worried: Would the people I love most love the land I love most? How could they not? All around were visceral pleasures. At the entrance to our building sprawled a sidewalk restaurant, and every morning they'd send up breakfast on a tray: bowls of bun bo hue, a spicy beef and pork noodle soup, or banh mi op la, fried eggs with baguettes as light as air. From the next door cafe, I would fetch tall glasses of Vietnamese iced coffee, made from house roasted beans and thick with condensed milk, plus pastries from Tous Les Jours, a Korean franchise bakery (not my pick, but the kids adore d it). We would eat in our cozy little apartment, and I'd sigh with contentment: This was just like my old life here but now I had people to share it with. From there, we'd venture out to see friends I'd long wanted my wife to meet. We visited Quynh Anh Pham, a thin, elegant video producer known as QA who had reinvented herself as Ho Chi Minh City's premiere modern florist. Her shop and cafe, Padma de Fleur, lay down a still unfinished alley; its courtyard was draped with dangling mokara orchids, watering cans painted blue and pastel pink, and weathered metal saucer lamps. The lemonades that QA served my daughters came garnished with pale roses, and there was yet another kitten for Sandy to play with. This was classic Saigon an oasis of sophisticated beauty that a casual visitor might never glimpse. Places like Padma de Fleur felt especially precious when I witnessed the big, obvious changes to the city's landscape. Like Takashimaya, the glittering, multistory Japanese mall that had just opened in the heart of Saigon, within sight of the Opera House (still lovely, a t about 120 years old) and bustling Ben Thanh Market. It was as fancy a mall as Vietnam has seen, chock full of international luxury brands (and a Japanese food court!), and it reminded me that back in 1996, there was but one mall, Saigon Superbowl, out near the airport, where country bumpkins would come to gape at, and fearfully attempt to ride, the city's sole escalator. Now, at Takashimaya, escalators intimidated no one except for one stylish woman wearing wobbly four inch heels, who held tightly to the railing as she ascended. The mall felt so utterly normal that I didn't freak out when Sandy ran off and got lost for 10 minutes this was no longer the rough and tumble city where you'd worry about kidnappers. Every excursion was an opportunity to compare the Vietnam I remembered with the Vietnam it now was, mostly to my delight, occasionally with disappointment. A road along the Ben Nghe Canal, for example, had been widened and landscaped into sunny modernity, but the project had wiped out old buildings, including an auto garage that, at night, turned into a secret shellfish restaurant. Sasha, however, approved. "I like this part of Vietnam," she said, gazing out the window of our taxi, "because it looks well trained. Nice and clean and it looks good like it works. The other parts ..." She trailed off, and I knew why: Vietnam was not a hit with my family. The heat was rough. (What did they expect during summer in Asia?) They were not fans of the dirt, the chaos, the insects. The kids kvetched about being bored. (Just like at home!) Jean remarked, "I don't think Southeast Asia is for families." So the task of entertaining fell to me. Whenever the heat grew too brutal, we would stop for sinh to, cool fruit shakes orange, mango, banana, soursop, avocado sold everywhere from the alleys of the backpacker district to market stalls in Cholon, the city's Chinatown. We took taxis and Ubers, not motorbikes. We rummaged the racks of Mayhem, a hidden away vintage clothing store, and emerged with armfuls of finds, including an oversize flutter sleeve top for Sasha and what Jean described as a "ditsy floral dress" for herself. I couldn't get over how far the city had progressed: Twenty years ago, used clothes were only for the poor; now you needed a credit card to buy them. Another friend, the Vietnamese American artist Trong Gia Nguyen, led us through the downtown gallery scene. At Galerie Quynh, which opened in 2003, I gushed over one of Trong's works, a laser cut facsimile of a brise soleil, the sun shielding patterned screens that you see everywhere in Vietnam, cut to the size of a window or an entire building's facade. At Dia Projects, Jean and I were entranced by "Fruits, Children the Cutting," Mai Hoang's disturbing, entrancing watercolor renderings of children as fruits dragonfruit, passionfruit, strawberries being opened, peeled, dissected. At each stop, Sasha sat on the ground and opened her notebook to draw, engrossed and uncomplaining. Sandy, meanwhile, was kept entertained by Trong's friend Athesia, a Canadian musician passing through on her way to gigs in Australia. I'm told they discussed "Frozen." Occasionally, my ladies even entertained themselves. While taking an Uber through Cholon, Jean pointed out a trio of early 20th century shophouses, slightly decrepit but charming still. "Is this where 'The Lover' was filmed?" she asked excitedly, referring to the 1992 movie based on the Marguerite Duras novel. If she could muster such enthusiasm, maybe my experiment was working? Love might be out of the question, but I'd settle for like. Instead, I got ambivalence. For every grand dinner of grilled pork and sour fish soup with old friends, there was a scary cockroach on some sidewalk. The grassy martini at Hum, a stylish vegetarian restaurant, was addictive, but we couldn't forget that grim immigration officer who'd stamped us into the country. ("I don't think he's happy to see us," Jean observed.) The kids may have enjoyed making crafts projects at the oddly named Somewhereland Madam Fatty Fatt, a Colonial era villa that had been renovated into a Hogwarts like castle, the kids seemed content to work on crafts projects, like cutting felt into hats and cloaks for wooden witch figurines. (Meanwhile, Jean and I sipped iced coffees.) But this was too chill for Sasha. "When you're young, you don't want to sit down and relax," she insisted. "You want to move!" Which is why, on our last day before flying to the beach, I booked a van to the Cu Chi tunnels, the underground former Viet Cong base, about 90 minutes outside Saigon, that is a major tourist draw. At last, the kids could roam and climb, and gawk at the admirably barbaric traps used to catch enemy soldiers, while I pointed out ponds that were really bomb craters and told them about a war I was born too late to remember firsthand. And, of course, we clambered about in the three foot high tunnels, which is any kid's dream but drew rivers of sweat even from this smaller than average American. When we emerged, Sandy (who could stand fully upright in the tunnels) explained: "You ate a lot of dinner that's why you didn't fit in the tunnel. You ate a lot of food like Anna and Elsa!" Sasha was more succinct: "This place is pretty amazing!" As my heart warmed, I also realized: Oh my god, my kids are ... tourists. They like it easy. They like fun. They're on vacation. What did I expect? One day, perhaps, they'd outgrow easy fun, and want to know how Vietnam turned Dad into Dad, but it didn't have to be today. Tomorrow we'd be at a pristine beach resort, with a swimming pool and a villa twice the size of our Brooklyn apartment easy fun for 500 a day. Someday, surely, we would return to Ho Chi Minh City. Maybe not next year, but someday. And then we could all compare the Vietnam we remembered with the Vietnam it would become. For her part, Jean had but a single requirement for our return. "Next time," she said, "I want to stay somewhere nicer."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Nonetheless, once Elkin began to look for a sorority of flaneuses, she found them, among contemporaries and in history. She talks in detail about some distinguished sisters: Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, the formidable George Sand. And because this is a memoir as well as a history, we follow Elkin herself as she explores several cities, beginning with New York, then moving on to Paris, London, Venice and Tokyo, a restless spirit in love with flanerie, finally coming to light in the city that gave her pastime its name. In a sense, Elkin's book is itself a flanerie, a stroll where the reader may come across an unexpected person say, the film directors Sophie Calle in Venice and Agnes Varda in Paris, looking for locations or get some ideas about May 1968 or the Situationists. Or marvel over an intriguing bit of research: like the discovery that one of the inspirations for George Sand's cross dressing came from her own mother, who confided that in childhood Sand was outfitted in boy's clothing by her father to cut down on the family's expenses. "Sand's trouser wearing was in its way an act of revolution," Elkin remarks. "At the very least, it was illegal. In the year 1800, a law had been passed forbidding women to wear them in public." Sometimes often the streets have a political function. Elkin talks about the short lived Occupy movement in New York and revisits Mavis Gallant's account of the riots in Paris in May 1968, still remembered by many of the French as the most fun they ever had: "And we look to 1968 for authenticity, just as they looked to the Communards. And to whom did the Communards look? To 1848." Gallant's great insight, Elkin realizes, was that the disturbances in Paris in 1968 were an early manifestation of the continuing immigration problems of today. Martha Gellhorn, one of Elkin's more redoubtable subjects, "contradicts the solitary, disassociated image we have of the flaneur, and redefines it as oriented toward some goal, some revelation, some way of recording and sharing what she had seen. . . . In her dedication to exposing misery, Gellhorn turned flanerie into testimony." If Elkin's capsule biographies can occasionally seem a bit potted, they are never uninteresting. Elkin has an eye for the unexpected detail, as befits a flaneuse. And so she's able to inform us that Jean Rhys, the English writer born in the West Indies and associated with novels set in Paris, where she was so famously down and out, didn't do well in drama school in London because of her Caribbean accent. And she reminds us that Rhys had an abandoned daughter who survived a concentration camp.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The strongest contrast between the two programs in this year's Erasing Borders Festival of Indian Dance was atmospheric. The first show, back in late August, was outdoors, against a backdrop of New York Harbor, Statue of Liberty and setting sun that both glorified the dancing and competed with it. The second installment, on Friday, took place inside the relative ordinariness of the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University. But there were also contrasts of content and style between the programs, both organized by the Indo American Arts Council. Whereas the first show was a comprehensive sampling of Indian classical styles, the second emphasized change and contemporary experiment. Vagaries of the weather were replaced by artistic risks. For the kathak dancer Mitul Sengupta, the modernizing elements included video projection. The graphics, which resembled bar codes or the waveforms of an oscilloscope, didn't add much, and some of the electronic sounds had a cheapening effect. But Ms. Sengupta's traditional technique was surer, especially in the precision and counter rhythms of her footwork. Though her shapes blurred in rapid spins, her franticness was somewhat justified by the ancient story she depicted of a son sacrificing his life in war. In "Morphed," by Veena Basavarajaiah, it was identity that oscillated. The piece's soloist, the British Asian dancer Subhash Viman, was an uncommon shape shifter, never less than lucid. One moment, he was the god Krishna playing his flute; the next, a club kid. He was a pedestrian, squatting, spitting, urinating, and then he was again divine, this time in female form.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
"When I come back from visiting Long Island and I see the buildings of Manhattan, I feel secure," said Marcelle Shaoul, 90, who moved from a condo in Manhasset to a rental on the Upper East Side. Over 60: Why Own When You Can Rent? Does New York City have a bigger booster than Marcelle Shaoul? This is an easy question: It does not. She loves listening to the garbage trucks as they make their early morning rounds. She is equally charmed by the other street sounds (horns, car alarms) that serenade her for the rest of the day. She is even delighted so she says by the sight of trash piling up curbside. It is just so very New York. Three years ago, when macular degeneration made driving impossible, Mrs. Shaoul, encouraged by her four children, decided it was time to sell her condo in Manhasset, N.Y., and move to Manhattan. "But I didn't want to buy," said Mrs. Shaoul, now 90, who settled happily in a two bedroom apartment with a balcony on the Upper East Side. "It was easier to rent." She joins a sizable crowd. Of the 30 most populous cities in the United States, New York has the largest share of households of renters age 60 and over 572,132, to be precise according to the apartment search website RENTCafe. In 2017, renters who were 60 or older made up 27 percent of the city's rental population, a 20 percent increase over the previous decade, according to RENTCafe's analysis of American Community Survey data from the United States Census Bureau. And senior renters outnumbered senior homeowners in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, as is the case for renters in general. They even outnumbered those in the under 34 demographic, if only by half a percent. Really, it makes perfect sense. Many young professionals, undone by the high cost of living in New York City, are reverse commuting moving to glossy new rentals near train stations in the business districts of suburbs while their parents flock to the city, sign leases, chase down culture and try to solve the mystery that is avocado toast. The group includes former co op shareholders who want to cash out and invest the proceeds elsewhere, but who want to remain in the city, at least for a while. It also includes suburban empty nesters who no longer require bonus rooms and backyards, and perhaps more to the point, have had it up to here with shoveling the driveway, mowing the lawn and cajoling the furnace. "We're in the middle of a very dynamic setting, which is accessible just by walking out the door," said Connie Vance, 79. Three years ago, Ms. Vance, a retired nursing professor, sold her Westchester townhouse and moved with her husband, Ralph Kelley, a semiretired lawyer, to the Encore, a rental building in Lincoln Square. "We loved the city and wanted less responsibility," Ms. Vance said. After two years in a one bedroom, the couple moved a few floors up, to a two bedroom, a very easy matter because, after all, they were dealing with a rental. The gym, the roof deck, the lobby all great. "But we don't have to maintain any of it," Ms. Vance said. "It's like living in a hotel." In some instances, the adult children of these new older New Yorkers also live in the city, along with the grandchildren. Such is the case with Mrs. Shaoul. Yet another reason to make the move. "You get to see your children for dinner or just for coffee," said Gary Malin, the president of the real estate brokerage Citi Habitats. "You don't have to make elaborate plans to see each other as you would if you were still living in the suburbs. It can be spur of the moment." The city, always relatively easy to navigate, always hospitable to people well past the first flush of youth, has become even more so in the past decade, said Kathy Braddock, a managing director at the real estate agency William Raveis NYC. "Before, the outer boroughs were a little isolated," she said. "But now you have Uber and Lyft." Access to the offerings of big box stores is also no longer the sole province of suburbanites. "With the advent of Amazon, the need to live out of the city for those resources no longer exists," Ms. Braddock said. "You combine that with advantages like joining a museum here for 100 a year and being invited to special parties for members and as you get older, you can make do with a smaller place, because New York becomes your playground." And in New York, unlike many other cities, there is no wrong side of the tracks stigma to renting. In the last five years, Nancy Albertson, the director of leasing for Glenwood, a real estate development and management company, has seen an uptick in over 60 renters at two of its Upper West Side properties, the Encore and Hawthorn Park. "I've had people tell me that living in Manhattan is part of their bucket list," Ms. Albertson said. Laurie Zucker, the vice chairman of Manhattan Skyline, a property development and management company, has seen a similar surge of over 60 renters in Skyline buildings like West River House on the Upper West Side, Claridge's in Midtown West and 55 Thompson in Soho. "We have people who are renting in certain buildings to be near their kids, who are bringing up their own kids in the city," Ms. Zucker said. "At 55 Thompson, we're seeing people in their 60s who are divorced and want to start their lives over in a young, hip neighborhood." Renting, as the over 60 demographic clearly understands, can be a synonym for freedom. Someone else has to fix the broken faucet. Someone else has to take out the trash. It's also a way of dipping your toe in, no commitment. If, after a year, you don't like the vibe of your building or neighborhood, you can try another part of town on for size, or simply leave town. Without question, New York is an expensive place to live. But as Mr. Malin observed, "When you look at the costs of owning a home and cars and the cost of insurance, it's not always as unobtainable as you think." For those who wonder how they would deal with tighter quarters, Mr. Malin points to the myriad amenity rich new construction rental properties that have sprung up in recent years. Even if the apartments themselves are relatively small, there are lots of other places to perch in many buildings: gyms and on site theaters, libraries, game rooms and lounges. Some have dining rooms that residents can reserve for large family gatherings. When William and Mary Deam became empty nesters, they no longer wanted to deal with the upkeep of their house in Greenwich, Conn., and they no longer wanted to be held hostage to the Metro North train schedule. In 2017, the couple moved to a two bedroom rental on the Upper West Side, within shouting distance of Lincoln Center "a wonderful resource," said Ms. Deam, 65, a homemaker. Their building has a gym and a rooftop terrace, which compensate for the downsizing. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. "We were very fortunate to be healthy and fit, and while we had that going for us, we thought it would be a smart thing to move to the city rather than going to a retirement situation in the south," she said. "It's been even more fun than I had hoped, and it's been a constant discovery process." Ms. Deam said she thought that she knew the city when she lived in Greenwich. "But it's different living here and being on the street," she said. "And it's so lovely to go to a concert and not edge out while others are applauding and think, 'Oh, am I going to be able to make the 11:10 train?'" Even many of those who toy with the idea of buying are holding off because of new and proposed changes to the tax code. "I have clients in this demographic who are factoring in that they can no longer fully deduct property tax in New York," said Graig Linn, a salesman at the real estate agency Douglas Elliman. "The result is that, as they're getting closer to retirement, they're looking for the simpler style of renting." Former co op owners may find the move to a rental singularly satisfying. No longer are they waking up every morning to ponder or, more to the point, worry about what exactly their apartment is worth. No longer are they at the mercy of a capricious board that can reject a prospective buyer, just because. "I do believe that as we get older, we want to be able to control our assets, and that's not always possible with a co op," said Ms. Braddock, of William Raveis. "If you've been in your apartment for a while, the asset has appreciated nicely, so why not stay liquid and rent?" Janna Raskopf, a saleswoman at Douglas Elliman, has clients who owned a co op on the Upper East Side, where they had raised a family. "They've sold, and now they're like, 'We want to rent downtown and see how it goes,'" Ms. Raskopf said. "If they like it, they may buy, but they don't want to make the commitment without trying it out." Among the new wave of renters are former New York City residents who left years ago to raise a family or to follow a spouse, but who always hoped they would come back someday. And someday is now. "I wanted to rent because I was looking for a foot in the door, and I wanted time to figure things out," said Ms. Strein, who now works in the hospitality business. "I have a one year lease because I want the flexibility of exploring other options." She doesn't have a washer and dryer, but so what? There's a drop off laundry nearby. And her new kitchen is compact. But again, who cares? "There are a lot of food places around, and I'll make do or do without. That's what city people do," said Ms. Strein, who is selling her car and eagerly anticipating walking everywhere. "My daughters still live on Long Island. They're not ready to move here," she added. "They're like, 'Oh, boy, here she goes. Mom is doing it.'" For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Facebook now faces investigations into its business practices from a variety of federal agencies. Officials have opened inquiries into possible civil and criminal violations of laws related to privacy, corporate governance and discrimination. Facebook has largely denied wrongdoing in each of the investigations and said it was cooperating with regulators and law enforcement. Here are the agencies looking into Facebook, and some of the issues involved. The top federal watchdog for consumer protection is investigating potential privacy violations by the social network. The inquiry began after reporting by The New York Times on the harvesting of Facebook user data by a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica. The investigation centers on whether Facebook broke promises it made in a consent decree in 2011, when it said it would tighten protections of user data and explain clearly to users how it handled sensitive data. The company could face more than 1 billion in fines and tighter restrictions over its handling of data.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
There will be a derby on Saturday. Three of them, in fact. Churchill Downs is hosting a virtual Kentucky Derby, one pitting all 13 Triple Crown winners against one another in a simulated race, while Oaklawn Park will run the Arkansas Derby. Twice. With so many horses with nowhere to run, the track in Hot Springs, Ark., is running its 1 million signature race in two divisions, each now worth 500,000. "For them to do what they've done, it's been a godsend," said Jack Wolf, the managing partner of Starlight Racing and a co owner of Charlatan, the morning line favorite to win the first division. The coronavirus pandemic has upended all sports, including horse racing, shutting it down in all but a handful of states and transforming the Triple Crown into something no one knows what quite yet. Racing has not resumed yet in Maryland or New York, so no dates have been confirmed for the Preakness or the Belmont Stakes. In March, the Kentucky Derby the live one was moved from the first Saturday in May to the first Saturday in September, when Churchill Downs officials decided the Derby wouldn't be the Derby without 150,000 plus fans, sporting big hats, pocket squares and clutching mint juleps. While Churchill Downs will start holding races without fans on May 16, Bill Carstanjen, its chief executive, said he was "fairly optimistic" that America's most famous race could be run this fall, perhaps in front of a scaled down live audience. He noted that the racetrack is 1 million square feet and offers a variety of seating options from picnic like grounds in the infield to premium suites. "There's still going to be social distancing issues," Carstanjen said in a call with investors and analysts on Thursday. "Whatever is capable of being done in this country in four months, whatever can be done, whatever is the maximum acceptable processes and protocols, that's where we'll be. That's what we'll be offering and that's what we'll do." The virtual Derby, billed as the Triple Crown Showdown, airs on Saturday on NBC at about 5:45 p.m., the time slot when the live race was originally scheduled. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the leading public health expert on President Trump's coronavirus task force, told The New York Times that it might be very difficult for major sports in the United States to return to action this year. He said it depends on whether the country can gain broad access to testing that quickly yields results something that has yet to materialize. "If you can't guarantee safety, then unfortunately you're going to have to bite the bullet and say, 'We may have to go without this sport for this season,'" said Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It has been a tumultuous year for one of America's oldest sports. In March, federal prosecutors rounded up 27 trainers, veterinarians and drug distributors and charged them in a series of indictments with doping racehorses and cheating the public. Among them was Jason Servis who trained Maximum Security, the winner of last year's Derby before being disqualified for interference after a tense 22 minute review. Servis was caught on wire taps talking about joint blockers and blood builders with colorful names like "red acid" and "monkey." Federal prosecutors allege that Maximum Security received performance enhancing drugs for his races, including the Derby. Last September, The Times reported that Justify, the 2018 Triple Crown winner, failed a drug test shortly before the Kentucky Derby. California racing officials spent four months investigating the failed test, long enough for Justify to not only compete in the Derby, but also win it, along with the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes. In an unusual closed door session, the racing board, whose chairman had a horse with Justify's trainer, Bob Baffert, cleared him of wrongdoing. Still, as trainers often say about their horses, the humans in the sport have been kicking down the barns to get back on the racetrack. New York racing officials have been working with the New York Gaming Commission and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to open Belmont Park without spectators. In March, The New York Racing Association suspended horse racing at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens after a worker who cared for the animals tested positive for the coronavirus. As many as 30 workers who live on the backstretch of Belmont Park have tested positive for the virus. In California, local health authorities are considering a proposal from Santa Anita Park for a fan free reopening. That racetrack's troubles began last year after 30 horses died in a six month stretch that ended in late June.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
On a recent Sunday on Howard Street, a well lit 1,900 square foot store became a brief sanctuary from the paparazzi. Rihanna swooped into Reformation, grabbed a pile of clothes, retreated to a dressing room and, within minutes, walked out with a new coat and 14 dresses, sweaters and tops. It cost her a little more than 2,000. This isn't all that uncommon: Rihanna has been to Reformation there are two stores in New York and one in Los Angeles before for a quick shopping spree. Taylor Swift shops there. As does the model Karlie Kloss. "It's funny, I have access to some of the most beautiful clothing in the world, some of the most expensive, elaborate couture pieces, and yet in my daily life I wear Reformation," Ms. Kloss said, when she was buttonholed at a private dinner last month. "It's very simple and it's cut really well." But first, it had to get a makeover. Founded in 2008, Reformation spent the first five years of its existence as a modest business. In the last 12 months, it has blown up. Last year it had about 9 million in revenue; this year it will do better than 25 million, said its founder, Yael Aflalo. Those sales are built by the power of its dresses, crop tops and A line miniskirts that generally range from 80 to 300. They are also eco friendly, relying on sustainable and vintage fabrics. When a customer walks into Reformation's SoHo store, these are the words that greet you: "Change the World Without Changing Your Style." "I want altruism and narcissism to be combined," said Ms. Aflalo, a Los Angeles native, in an interview at Le Pain Quotidien on a recent trip to New York. This isn't the first time Ms. Aflalo, 37, has built a fashion business, even if she is an unfamiliar name within the fashion world (even in Los Angeles). She founded the label Ya Ya in 1999, which, at its high water mark around 2005, was earning more than 20 million a year. Ms. Aflalo credits a Zara like fast fashion model for Reformation's success. She wants her clothes in and out of her store and on and off her website as quickly as possible. (A few weeks ago, she hired Zara's trend director, Manuel Ruyman Santos, to become Reformation's design director.) There were a lot of lessons from that previous business that have helped her turn Reformation into a success. She founded Ya Ya at age 21 and was part of a wave of designers who made their name after getting a push by the Los Angeles retailer, Fred Segal. "Young girls would literally come off the street and come in with collections," said John Eshaya, the head buyer for Fred Segal at the time. "Either I'd buy it or mentor them, and in return it gave us new designers that nobody else had." At Mr. Eshaya's encouragement, Ms. Aflalo created a collection, it took off and before long she was making "considerable money," she said. "I bought a big house, I had more than one car, and the cars were convertibles," she said, "and I had parties, and I would go on long design vacations." "The markdown agreements started coming in from the department stores, and all the boutiques were closing, and they couldn't pay their bills," she said. "You have accounts receivable that just disappeared overnight. I said I can either fight to keep this business alive or I can just close it." She closed it and fell into debt with suppliers. She let her staff go and kept three people around. She decided to make the smallest of comebacks: She took vintage dresses and customized them. She opened up a store for those dresses and called it Reformation. She cobbled together another 25,000 and added a store in New York. "They popped off," she said. "I thought there was no way in hell that this store was going to make money. I thought it might eke by." She started doing dresses and tops for Urban Outfitters, and before long, her debts were paid off. "I had stores in New York and Los Angeles, I was happy," she said. "I didn't work that much. The stores were fun. I could afford the lifestyle I wanted to have. Then I went to China." "I realized I could build a business that solved these problems," she said. AS GRANDIOSE AS that plan was, it forced her to create a bigger business, one that wasn't relying on orders from Urban Outfitters or a small retail business with a couple of stores. One wondered if perhaps she was tapping into an increasingly popular desire to be eco conscious. Was this just an elaborately dressed up marketing plan? "It's not a marketing thing," she said. "It's fortuitous timing." She had to figure out where she could make her clothes with the sort of the sustainable materials she wanted to use. In her previous business, there were plenty of manufacturing headaches. "I was constantly fighting with the factory," she said. " 'You didn't do it right, it's late, give me back 20 percent.' And then it was a feeling of like: I don't want to fight with these people anymore. I want to control how our clothes are made." She opened her own factory with her own workers and that provided her flexibility she never had in her previous business. Some might question whether a fast fashion model and eco consciousness are in any way compatible, but she has received a warm reception from advocates. Reformation recently finished as a runner up in a Council of Fashion Designers of America eco fashion challenge. "Right now, there's an appetite for fast fashion and clothes that are inexpensive and have style," said Julie Gilhart, a fashion consultant who is outspoken about eco fashion. "I can't fault her. She's gaining traction, she's getting girls to wear her clothes, and she's talking about this. It's a much better way to approach fast fashion than some of the other fast fashion companies that aren't doing anything or aren't talking about it as much." If there is one place where Reformation really picked up steam in the last year, it is its online store. As late as February 2013, Reformation did only about 19,000 in sales online. "Online you don't sell clothes, you sell images," she said. "We always did well in the stores, but we didn't know how to present ourselves online. E commerce? People are always standing like this." Specific looks and poses emerged online: If there's a skirt, she's twirling ("Twirling is big," she said); if there's a jacket, she's looking down ("Leather jackets, they're all looking down."). By last month, Reformation was doing 1.6 million in sales online, she said. The online business now represents about 65 percent of all revenue. THE REFORMATION LOOK, both online and in the stores, has a vaguely scattershot vintage feel to it. On Monday night at the SoHo store, Sade's " Sweetest Taboo" played from the speakers. Hangers are built to accommodate retro shoulder pads. Reformation's New Year's Eve collection is inspired by the 1970s. Mel Ottenberg, Rihanna's stylist, said that when he was looking at Reformation's clothes, "it looked like it came right off the set of '90210.'" (Ms. Aflalo grew up in Beverly Hills). When Mr. Ottenberg was working on a Rihanna Rolling Stone cover last year, he put her in a Reformation jumpsuit. "I wanted something really pure and easy," he said. "And when you want something like that, it's really hard to find. Sometimes designers struggle with that. We were looking at this rack of stuff, and that 75 jumper was the only thing we tried on. It was simple and easy, and this line gets that." Likewise, Ms. Kloss talked about how comfortable the clothes made her. "My favorite thing is to wear Reformation in the summer," she said. "I live in those dresses in the summer." Ms. Aflalo said that summer designs are by far the best selling season for Reformation, but with her sudden windfall she hopes to change that. Sweaters are being introduced, as are more coats. But she is still focused on her bread and butter: those dresses. And if there's one thing she really wants to maintain, it's their uniqueness. There are rarely more than 40 units per style per color, she said. "One of the things that's important to me is that when girls go to a party, I'd like to limit the chance that a girl will be at a party wearing Reformation and run into another girl that has the same dress on in the same print," she said. That might get harder to pull off.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor is the producer of American Realness, a dance and performance festival that he founded in 2010. He is also the manager of several artists. His main client is Miguel Gutierrez, who has appeared at American Realness every year. At the Abrons Arts Center on Monday, the festival presented four premieres. One was by the excellent Tere O'Connor. One was Mr. Gutierrez's latest work, "Age Beauty Part 2: Asian Beauty the Werq Meeting or The Choreographer Her Muse or : ." If this already seems like nepotism, as Mr. Gutierrez admitted it was, what is the word for Mr. Pryor's participation in the piece, playing himself? Much of the work consists of recitations of past conversations between the two men about scheduling, money and tensions in their professional relationship. One of those discussions turns on the decision to present "Age Beauty Part 2" at American Realness. For a festival sometimes disparaged as an insider affair, this is going all out. But you don't have to be interested in Mr. Pryor and Mr. Gutierrez to find the performance intermittently effective and affecting. Being bored by their behind the scenes exchanges only increases the sadness evoked by the piece and its dramatization of the difficulties of making art amid the distractions of an artist's career. Michelle Boule, who has appeared in all of Mr. Gutierrez's group works since 2001, plays herself too, reprising bits from other roles. But she is also a ghostly muse. As Mr. Pryor and Mr. Gutierrez talk, she stands on the table between them, at one point blindfolded and bound, softly blowing on the face of the oblivious choreographer. She knocks the table askew, but they keep prattling on.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The Belfast born writer Ciaran Carson in an undated photo. The president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, said Mr. Carson's poetry and prose "revealed a deep love of place." Ciaran Carson, whose poetry and prose captured the pungency, tensions and rich heritage of Northern Ireland, especially his native Belfast, died in that city on Oct. 6. He was 70 . Laura Susijn of the Susijn Agency, which represented him, said the cause was lung cancer. Mr. Carson was perhaps best known as a poet, and his most acclaimed collection may have been "Belfast Confetti," published in 1989. "Carson's lanky verses and prose poems have made poetry out of the scary complexities of the distraught city," Thomas D'Evelyn wrote of that volume in The Christian Science Monitor. Its title poem begins with a jarring collision of imagery: Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, Nuts, bolts, nails, car keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion Itself an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire ... I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept stuttering. All the alleyways and side streets blocked with stops and colons. He experimented with structure, and his style evolved, from longer lines to shorter, fragmented ones. "I can't say why the forms in which I write have changed so radically over the years," he told the Wake Forest University Press in 2010, "but it seems we should adopt new methods for new situations. The situation demands the form." His exploratory nature also infused a wide variety of prose works. There was the mosaic like "Shamrock Tea" (2001), which, as The Guardian put it, "claims to be a novel but might equally be filed under History , Philosophy, Art, or Myth and Religion." There was the idiosyncratic memoir "The Star Factory" (1997), which The Chicago Tribune called "a positive, loving, even celebratory evocation, the work of a man determined to live an ordinary urban life, and to clear in it a place for the imagination." There was "Last Night's Fun," his meditation on traditional Irish music, each chapter bearing the title of a beloved song. "He leaves such a wide body of work that people will have their own favourites , including the magnificent 'Belfast Confetti,'" the president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, said in a statement. "Representing Belfast in all its variety, the memoirs and books, such as 'The Star Factory,' revealed a deep love of place." Ciaran (pronounced KEER ahn) Gerard Carson was born on Oct. 9, 1948, in Belfast to William and Mary (Maggin) Carson. His father was a postman, and his mother worked in linen mills. The family was Roman Catholic and bilingual, speaking the Irish language at home, and Mr. Carson grew up with an appreciation of words, their origins and their sounds. "I used to lull myself to sleep with language," he wrote in "The Star Factory," "mentally repeating, for example, the word capall, the Irish for horse, which seemed to me more onomatopoeically equine than its English counterpart; gradually, its trochaic foot would summon up a ghostly echo of 'cobble,' till, wavering between languages, I would allow my disembodied self to drift out the window and glide through the silent dark gas lit streets above the mussel coloured cobblestones." He earned a degree in English in 1971 at Queen's University, Belfast, then in 1975 took a job with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He would remain there until 1998, dealing first with traditional music and then literature. His first poetry collection, "The New Estate," was published in 1976. His poetry often addressed the tensions inherent in living in Belfast during troubled times. "Last Orders," from "Belfast Confetti," begins starkly: Squeeze the buzzer on the steel mesh gate like a trigger, but It's someone else who has you in their sights. Click. It opens. Like electronic Russian roulette, since you never know for sure who's who, or what You're walking into. I fear the vast dimensions of eternity. I fear the gap between the platform and the train. I fear the onset of a murderous campaign. I fear the palpitations caused by too much tea. I fear the drawn pistol of a rapparee. I fear the books will not survive the acid rain. I fear the ruler and the blackboard and the cane. I fear the Jabberwock, whatever it might be. I fear the bad decisions of a referee. I fear the only recourse is to plead insane. I fear the implications of a lawyer's fee. I fear the gremlins that have colonized my brain. I fear to read the small print of the guarantee. And what else do I fear? Let me begin again. Mr. Carson who was also a translator, working in several languages viewed writing poetry not as an exercise in setting down an idea, but as an exploration. "The kind of examination question which used to be put, 'What did the poet have in mind when he said ...' is an assumption that the poet clothes his thought in verse," he told The Spectator in 2012, "whereas the poet often doesn't know what he has in mind: He follows the language, and sees where it might lead him, which is usually a very different place from what he thought at the onset. "If you know exactly what you are going to say in a poem," he continued, "that poem will be a failure. Besides, there is no interest or fun, in saying what you already know." Mr. Carson, who was a skilled flutist, married Deirdre Shannon, an accomplished fiddle player, in 1982. She survives him, as do their three children, Manus, Gerard and Mary; and four siblings, Caitlin, Pat, Brendan and Liam.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, our TV critic Margaret Lyons offers hyper specific viewing recommendations in our Watching newsletter. Read her latest picks below, and sign up for the Watching newsletter here. This Weekend I Have ... an hour, and I like longing stares 'The Split' When to watch: Thursdays and Fridays at midnight, on Sundance TV. Season 2 of this juicy legal drama picks right up where things left off, so definitely start with Season 1 it's available on multiple platforms. Nicola Walker stars as Hannah, a divorce lawyer from a family of divorce lawyers, where everyone's business is everyone's business. There's ample steaminess to "The Split," but the show doesn't see itself as a soap, and so those secret glances and thrilling transgressions have real weight and consequence. If you like ensemble dramas in which smart, elegant people stand in nice kitchens and sadly ponder their lives, watch this. Lance Armstrong, the subject of the documentary "Lance." 'Lance' When to watch: Sunday at 9 p.m., on ESPN. This new "30 for 30" documentary is a steady enough portrait of Lance Armstrong but a real wonderland of obstinacy. Excellence in any discipline requires determination, and in some ways, stubbornness is an asset for athletes but not in all ways. What in flattering light looks like tenacity can also be a chronic refusal to acknowledge reality, and "Lance" finds forcefields of stubbornness around many of its subjects, including society's abundant willingness to ignore obvious truths. Part 1 airs this weekend; Part 2 airs next Sunday. ... many hours, and I need to smile 'Cheers' When to watch: Now, on CBS All Access, Hulu and Netflix. "Cheers" is leaving Netflix at the end of June, though it will remain on other platforms and will be available on Peacock, NBC's new streaming service, when it debuts in July. But if you are in a Netflix only household, or you just need a fortifying TV project, this is the perfect time to visit or revisit the influential sitcom, which holds up exceptionally well thanks to great jokes and even better chemistry. Sam and Diane (Ted Danson and Shelley Long) are the quintessential will they won't they couple, but every pairing has its own special wavelength. You will never regret deciding to watch an episode of "Cheers."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Peter Green, the English guitarist and singer who founded Fleetwood Mac, died on Saturday. He was 73. He died in his sleep, according to a statement from his family's solicitors, Swan Turton. The statement did not say where he died or what the cause was. Mr. Green drew deeply on American blues to build a style that could be menacingly propulsive or darkly melancholy. His voice, and the songs he wrote, often spoke of troubled thoughts, and his guitar solos relied on expressive, long lined melody rather than speed. "I like to play slowly and feel every note," he once said. Mr. Green led Fleetwood Mac for less than three years, from 1967 to 1970, and left the group before it became one of the world's best selling pop hitmakers in the late 1970s. But during the band's first years it grew hugely popular in Britain; it had a No. 1 single in 1968 with the instrumental "Albatross," written by Mr. Green. Mr. Green wrote most of Fleetwood Mac's early songs, including "Black Magic Woman," which later became an American hit for Santana. B.B. King, one of Mr. Green's paramount influences, said, "He has the sweetest tone I ever heard," and added, "He was the only one who gave me the cold sweats." Peter Green was born Peter Allen Greenbaum on Oct. 29, 1946, in London, the son of Joe and Anne Greenbaum, and grew up in the Whitechapel neighborhood. He started playing guitar in elementary school. In his teens, he was in bands including Shotgun Express, a Motown style soul band featuring a young Rod Stewart. Mr. Green joined John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers as Eric Clapton's successor on lead guitar, appearing on the band's 1967 album "A Hard Road." Mr. Mayall gave Mr. Green some recording studio time as a birthday present in 1966, and Mr. Green set up a session with the Bluesbreakers' rhythm section: Mick Fleetwood on drums and John McVie on bass. The recordings included an instrumental named "Fleetwood Mac." Mr. Green left the Bluesbreakers to start his own blues band in 1967, with Mr. Fleetwood, the guitarist Jeremy Spencer and, joining soon afterward, Mr. McVie. The group's 1968 debut album titled "Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac" in Britain and "Fleetwood Mac" in the United States vigorously emulated American blues. In January 1969, the band visited the famed Chess Records studios in Chicago to record with the blues musicians Otis Spann, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy and others for an album released under the titles "Fleetwood Mac in Chicago" and "Blues Jam at Chess." They also made a full album with Mr. Spann, "The Biggest Thing Since Colossus," in New York City. But Mr. Green was moving the band away from narrowly defined blues in instrumental ballads like "Albatross" and "Oh Well (Part 2)," introspective pop like "Man of the World" and the hard rock of "The Green Manalishi." He constructed much of "Then Play On," his last album with Fleetwood Mac, on his own instead of cooperatively with the band. "A blues doesn't have to be a 12 bar progression," he said in 1968. "It can cover any musical chord sequence. To me, the blues is an emotional thing. If a song has the right emotion and feel, I accept it as a blues." In his final concerts with Fleetwood Mac, he sometimes performed in a monk's robe with a large crucifix around his neck; he also urged the other members of the band to donate Fleetwood Mac's profits to charity. His last song with the group, "The Green Manalishi," denounced the nightmarish power of money. In 1970, he left Fleetwood Mac. "I want to change my whole life, really, because I don't want to be at all a part of the conditioned world, and as much as possible, I am getting out of it," he told New Musical Express. In 1970 he released a solo album, "The End of the Game," edited from free form jazz rock jam sessions. "I was trying to reach things that I couldn't before but I had experienced through LSD and mescaline," he told Mojo magazine. In 1971 when Jeremy Spencer suddenly left Fleetwood Mac to join a religious cult Mr. Green briefly rejoined the band to fulfill its remaining American tour dates. But then he withdrew from performing. Mr. Green's main instrument in Fleetwood Mac was a 1959 Les Paul Standard, known as Greeny, that had one pickup installed in reverse, creating a distinctive tone because it put the instrument's two pickups magnetically out of phase. After leaving Fleetwood Mac, he sold the guitar to the Irish rocker Gary Moore; in 1995, Mr. Moore made an album of Mr. Green's songs called "Blues for Greeny." The guitar is now owned by Kirk Hammett of Metallica. Mr. Green was found to have schizophrenia in the 1970s. He underwent electroconvulsive therapy and was in and out of mental hospitals. In 1978 he married a Canadian fiddle player, Jane Samuels; they divorced in 1979. He is survived by their daughter, Rosebud Samuels Greenbaum. He sat in with Fleetwood Mac during studio sessions for the band's 1979 album, "Tusk," appearing on the song "Brown Eyes." He returned to making music in public in 1979 with the solo album "In the Skies," followed by an album a year into the mid 1980s often working with his brother Michael Greenbaum, also known as Mike Green, who wrote songs for him. But his medications left him increasingly sluggish and unable to make music until he weaned himself from prescription tranquilizers in the 1990s.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
For me, it's the Trivago guy. I emphatically change the channel when he comes on. He reminds me of the smarmiest guy in high school who always had a flippant answer for everybody. For one of my friends, it's the MyPillow.com guy. "It's just a pillow, and shut up about it," he will yell at the TV when the commercial comes on. Another friend recently posted on Facebook about his advertising pet peeve: the recycling campaign spot in which a shampoo bottle becomes a hairbrush, as narrated from the bottle's simpering perspective. ("They said a bottle was just a bottle ... that no one would ever notice me.")	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
With that single aggressively punctuated tweet, Phillip Iscove, a creator of the Fox drama "Sleepy Hollow," summed up what Hollywood writers seemed to be feeling on Tuesday, after a middle of the night deal between studios and writers to avert a strike. Conspicuously not doing a victory lap was the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios. A tentative agreement for a new three year, master contract with the producers' alliance and unions representing more than 12,000 television and movie writers was reached at around 1 a.m. on the West Coast. The previous contract expired at midnight, and the Writers Guild of America, West, and the Writers Guild of America, East, had vowed to go on strike as early as Tuesday morning. A walkout would have immediately sent late night comedy shows into reruns and threatened important presentations planned by ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC to attract advertising. The unions declared in an email to members that they had won "unprecedented gains." Leaders added: "Did we get everything we wanted? No. Everything we deserve? Certainly not. But because we had the near unanimous backing of you and your fellow writers, we were able to achieve a deal that will net this guild's members 130 million more, over the life of the contract, than the pattern we were expected to accept." One thing writers wanted and did not get was uniform pay for writing done across platforms, whether that be a traditional broadcast network, cable channel or streaming service. Still, the celebratory whoops of union members were warranted, said Miranda J. Banks, a professor of film and media at Emerson College in Boston, who followed the talks closely. Ms. Banks is the author of the 2014 book, "The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild." "The union was extremely tactical in these negotiations, and it shows in the outcome," she said. "They came in with a plan and expertly executed it." The guilds, with David Young serving as their chief negotiator, did seem to approach the talks in a strategic fashion. Bargaining started on March 13, with writers asking for a long list of contract enhancements. After breaking off on March 24 each side blamed the other Mr. Young and his cohorts immediately ratcheted up the pressure, sending letters to TV advertisers promising a strike if no deal was reached by Monday and asking members to authorize a walkout. Writers voted overwhelmingly to give their unions that cudgel; 6,310 ballots were cast, representing 68 percent of eligible voters, with 96 percent in favor of a walkout if no palatable deal was offered by studios. On Sunday, studios made a new offer one reflecting improvements in some areas (health care) and scant movement in others (raises for streaming series) and the unions on Monday afternoon made counteroffers that held a hard line on multiple demands, according to three people briefed on the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "Calm, cool, honest and authentic every step of the way," Damon Lindelof, a member of the union's negotiating committee, wrote in an email on Tuesday of the guild's leadership. Mr. Lindelof, whose credits include "The Leftovers," "World War Z," and "Lost," also gave credit to studio negotiators for "being true to their word in hearing our membership's concerns about the dramatic shifts in the way our business now functions." Carol Lombardini, who led talks for the producers' alliance, declined an interview request. One big sticking point involved what is known as "span," or how long television writers spend on each script. There are more shows than ever, but networks are ordering far fewer episodes per season as few as six, compared with 22 or more in the past. At the same time, the episodes that are ordered are taking longer to produce up to three weeks per episode, rather than the usual two. So series writers who are paid per episode often make less while working more. Part of the deal involved a union health insurance plan, which is running steep deficits, in part because it provides extremely generous coverage. Studios agreed to a bailout, while the union agreed to cost saving changes. To some degree, studios were concerned about setting a precedent for negotiations with other Hollywood unions. The actors' contract with producers expires on June 30. Share prices for most major entertainment companies were either unaffected or slightly down in trading on Tuesday. Doug Creutz, an analyst at Cowen and Company, wrote in a research note that the deal with writers was "positive" for media conglomerates, "as a strike invited several serious risk factors," including "permanent acceleration of audience loss away from traditional TV and ad dollars from TV to digital." As the entertainment capital waited for word on down to the wire talks on Monday, union loyalists posted messages on Twitter using the hashtag wgaunity. Eileen Conn, whose credits include the Disney Channel series "K.C. Undercover" and the 1990s sitcom "Just Shoot Me," posted a photo of Sally Field as the title character from the film "Norma Rae" and wrote: "We are strong! We are united!"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Sometimes, a week of vacation just isn't enough, and travelers who can spare the time for a longer getaway have plenty of choices: Travel companies are increasingly offering itineraries that span three weeks or more. Here are a few of them. Down Under Answers has a 22 day tour of New Zealand that starts in Christchurch and includes visits to Queenstown, Auckland and Stewart Island in the country's far south. Prices begin at 8,825 a person inclusive of accommodations, tours and most meals. Departure dates are available throughout the year. More than twice as long is the 47 day Great Silk Road Adventure from Wild Frontiers; the trip takes a major branch of the Silk Road from Beijing to Istanbul. Along the way, they stop in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran and visit 15 Unesco World Heritage Sites. Departs Sept. 11, 2017; PS10,000 a person is all inclusive except for flights. Those who want to mix a land trip with a cruise can consider the 23 Day Alaska and Canadian Rockies Tour from John Hall's Alaska. During the 16 day land portion, travelers take in the landscape of the Canadian Rockies from a luxury motorbus and also tour Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska. Then there's a seven day Royal Caribbean cruise where they can see the majestic Hubbard Glacier. Travelers can join the waiting list for a tour in 2018. Prices start at 8,100 a person.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
It's hard to read the headlines and not conclude that becoming a homeowner is a terrible idea. This week, the National Association of Realtors announced that existing home sales in July had fallen an astounding 25.5 percent from the previous year. Sure, there was a federal tax credit in place last summer. But with single family home sales at their lowest level since 1995 and unemployment still stubbornly high, home prices may fall further. In the meantime, millions of homeowners are still far underwater, and government programs to help them have fallen well short of their goals. More foreclosures are coming, casting a deeper shadow over home prices. So it's hardly surprising that the conventional wisdom says that home values will never again rise faster than inflation. But as with stocks and the weather, it is dangerous to assume any certainty in the housing market. And by wallowing too much in the misery of others, people looking for a new place to live run the risk of thinking every home purchase will end in regret, at least financially. Many still could, if they buy in hard hit areas where prices could fall further. But a mortgage is still a form of long term forced savings, after all. This is more important than ever, since fewer people have access to generous pensions than they did during the last big housing slump. A 401(k) or similar plan is no bargain, either, with its erratic returns and employer matches that come and go as the economic winds shift. Social Security is also likely to be less generous, and Medicare will probably cost more. Besides, owning a home isn't just about what shows up on a net worth statement something that bears repeating after all the "investing" that people thought they were doing when buying homes over the last 10 or 15 years. Many of these more qualitative factors, from living free of a landlord's whim to having access to a good school district or retirement community, haven't changed and probably never will. It is possible, as a homeowner, to make very little money but still buy plenty of happiness. So before you swear off real estate, reconsider a few of the basics. WORST CASES Some buyers may rue the day in 2010 they bought their homes. They may end up like those who bought in 2006 and have lost their jobs. Now those people face the difficulty of moving to pursue employment elsewhere because they owe much more than their homes are worth. Marke Hallowell and Allison Firmat, who are getting married next month, are well aware of the history. Yet they plan to put 5 percent or less down, using a fixed rate mortgage backed by the Federal Housing Administration, once they find a condominium in southern Orange County, Calif. (They've already been outbid a few times.) Ms. Firmat is not working, and Mr. Hallowell is a Web developer. Does he worry about mobility problems or making the payments in the event of a job loss, given that he's the sole breadwinner? "We're getting such a good deal on interest rates that we could rent our place out," he said. Mr. Hallowell and Ms. Firmat say they believe their approach is conservative, at least compared to what they might have done five years ago. "Nothing is going to change the rate we will have," Mr. Hallowell said. "Condos like the ones we're looking at now were unobtainable in the past, unless we went into something with a total balloon payment. There were times I was tempted, but never seriously." Indeed, many people who are buying at the moment are locking in mortgage rates of about 4.5 percent. A year ago, they might have paid 5.25 percent on a 300,000 loan for a monthly payment of about 1,657. Today, you could lock in a lower monthly payment of around 1,520 on a mortgage that size, or you might not need to borrow that much, given that prices have fallen in many areas. Marke Hallowell and Allison Firma want to use a fixed rate mortgage backed by the Federal Housing Administration to buy a condominium. Richard Termine for The New York Times FORCED SAVINGS You may make nothing at all beyond inflation over time on a home, but the part of your mortgage payment that goes toward principal is a form of forced savings. Sure, you might do better by renting and investing the difference between the rent and the total costs of ownership. But at least three things need to go right. First, you need to actually save the money. Americans have trouble with that sort of plan. Then, you need an after tax return that's better than whatever a home would deliver. That's a task that might not have gone so well over the last 10 or 12 years, and it involves its own future risk, given how little safer investments are returning now. Finally, you must not raid the savings along the way. DIFFICULT LANDLORDS A bank can kick you out only if you don't pay your mortgage. But landlords can drive you away in any number of ways. Laura Mapp and her husband, Carl Berg, rented from a relative, but it didn't go particularly well. They found another landlord they liked, but came back from a holiday trip one year to a note saying he wanted to move in himself. They had a month to scram. (The note came with a bottle of wine, at least.) In yet another rental, they let their landlord know they were looking to buy and inquired about a month to month lease. No problem, their landlord said, as long as they used his boyfriend as their real estate agent. Earlier this year, the couple gave up on landlords and bought a house in the Highland Park neighborhood in Seattle. THE NICE PART OF TOWN No matter how pretty the neighborhood, prices may still fall further in places like greater Detroit, Cleveland and Las Vegas; outlying areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix; and much of Florida. If you're looking elsewhere, consult The Times's rent versus buy calculator, halfway down the page at nytimes.com/yourmoney. But if you want to live in the Fox Hill Farm development in Glen Mills, Pa., you'll have to buy because renters are not allowed, said Bob Kuhn, who lives there. The same may be true of other communities for older people. And there may not be many family size rentals or at least any financial edge to be gained by renting in suburbs or urban neighborhoods with excellent public schools. After many years of building their down payment fund and a couple of years of watching the listings in the Eagle Rock and Mount Washington areas of Los Angeles, Garret and Alison Williams realized that prices simply were not falling much there. By the time they were ready to pounce this year, they had a big enough down payment and interest rates had fallen so far that renting didn't make much financial sense, even if they could have found a rental big enough for them and their two small children. "Had we rented, we would be paying more than we're paying for a mortgage," said Ms. Williams, who had lived in the same two bedroom rental for 12 years before she and her family moved into their new house in Eagle Rock earlier this month. "I don't see how we could really regret having made the move when it's so much better for us on so many levels."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Carlos Ghosn, chief executive of Nissan, said in an interview on Japanese television this week that new battery technology that would improve the range of the Leaf electric vehicle was on its way. Mr. Ghosn was coy with details, but confirmed that the E.V.'s range would be doubled, to almost 250 miles. (Daily Kanban) General Motors announced this week that it hired Craig Daitch, a former social media manger from Ford, to head the social media program for its Chevrolet brand. The automaker said that Mr. Daitch, who had most recently managed the digital marketing account for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles at SapientNitro, would be responsible for the social media campaigns that accompany Chevrolet's new model introductions and racing program. (Automotive News, subscription required) Carjacking is down in Detroit it dropped from 1,231 incidents in 2008 to 701 last year but still happens three times more often than in New York City, which has a population 10 times as large. By mid November, the number of carjackings in the Motor City was 485, a 31 percent drop from 2013. The Detroit Free Press noted that although the city's dwindling population might have had something to do with the decline 13 percent of its residents had left since 2008 police and federal agents have also been cracking down. (The Detroit Free Press) Bob Thomas, who once ran Nissan's North American sales operation, died Nov. 23 at the age of 69. Mr. Thomas, who was the chief executive of the Nissan Motor Corporation U.S.A. from 1993 97, left the company before its financial rescue by Renault. He went on to lead marketing at AutoNation and later served as the North American chief executive of Edmunds. (Automotive News, subscription required)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Dressed in loosefitting pants, a military jacket and black and cream heels, her hair curly and buoyant, Tatiana von Furstenberg walked languidly through an exhibition at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side on a sunny November afternoon. Drawings in all manners of style pointillism, minimalism, Art Deco, realism, Pop Art covered the walls. She strode past studies of nudes, portraits of Rihanna, depictions of Jesus and more, pausing to comment on the ones that caught her eye. Ms. von Furstenberg, 45, the daughter of the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg (and her first husband, Prince Egon von Furstenberg), first came into the public eye in 1975 at age 4, when her mother released Tatiana, a perfume named after her. As might be expected of someone with a royal father and a glamorous, high profile mother, Ms. von Furstenberg attended boarding school in Europe, grew up in homes around the world, spoke several languages and was even photographed by Richard Avedon for Egoiste, a French magazine. She was well on her way to being positioned as, if not DVF, and least TVF. But on this day, Ms. von Furstenberg, wearing nothing designed by her mother, didn't have either fashion or glamour on the mind. She wasn't at Abrons to pick out a piece to adorn her homes in Los Angeles and New York. Nor was it her own art she was showing off. The drawings on the walls, most made with pencil or pen and one with Kool Aid and an asthma inhaler, were contributions from people in the L.G.B.T. community who are, or were recently, incarcerated in the American prison system. For Ms. von Furstenberg, they reflect a calling very different from her mother's. The show, called "On the Inside" and on view through Dec. 18, has been more than four years in the making and is a collaboration between Ms. von Furstenberg and Black and Pink, a grass roots organization that provides a network of support for L.G.B.T. inmates and works to abolish the prison system. "I'm not a volunteering type of person," said Ms. von Furstenberg, who began studying media and comparative literature at Brown University at 16, and whose past projects include opening Steinberg and Sons, a clothing boutique in Los Angeles that's now closed; recording music as the lead singer in a band called Playdate; and, more recently, writing, directing and producing two films, one a short ("Tyrolean Riviera") and one a feature ("Tanner Hall"). So how did a nonvolunteering type end up doing something that so closely resembles volunteering? "I didn't know what I wanted to do after 'Tanner Hall,' so I went to a gestalt storytelling workshop, and we talked how important it is to cultivate a culture of compassion," she said. "Stories connect people and can ignite humanity." Though Ms. von Furstenberg's interests and activities have ranged across quite a spectrum (her best friend and creative partner on "Tanner Hall," Francesca Gregorini, said, "She's always been, out of all of our friends, the most of a Renaissance woman"), she realized her drive to tell stories was the common thread. And while in the past those stories have reflected her own life "Tanner Hall," for example, was loosely based on some of her experiences at boarding school this time Ms. von Furstenberg decided to share the tales of others, in part because of a connection she rarely reveals. Ms. von Furstenberg has a genetic muscular disease that makes her tire quickly and sometimes requires her to use a wheelchair. As she sees it, living with those constraints as a child, and being unable to participate in basic activities like swimming and running, gave her an enhanced ability to empathize with those who are marginalized. So when she stumbled upon Black and Pink, an idea rapidly formed. As part of its efforts to connect the L.G.B.T. community in prison, the organization puts out a monthly newsletter that features writing and artwork by inmates around the country. Ms. von Furstenberg realized that giving a public platform to some of the art she saw in the booklet's pages could bring the conversation about prison reform to a larger audience. So she placed a call for art in the newsletter, and over the next few years, more than 4,000 submissions poured in, all through snail mail. Because of prison rules, Ms. von Furstenberg had to donate to the commissary account of the artists whose work she accepted instead of paying them directly. (Those who submitted pieces requested that their work be considered a donation and the monetary payment a gift.) After poring over the contenders, most of which were done on recycled copy paper, she loosely organized the show into categories: self portraits, love, religion, warriors and celebrity. In the art center, the drawings hung in simple frames against a backdrop that featured certain pieces from each category blown up to the size of a mural. Quotations that Ms. von Furstenberg pulled from letters the artists sent her were displayed in large type on the walls. In the center of the exhibition, Ms. von Furstenberg built a room about the size of a cell and placed the non P.G. art inside. Jennifer Mayo, who was in prison for six years and sent in nine drawings, was glad to see that the pieces in the show weren't what she called "prison art." She explained that artists inside often make commissioned works in exchange for funds that allow them to purchase basic necessities in the commissary like deodorant and shampoo. The resulting art is worthy in its own right, but not necessarily an expression of the personal struggles of those incarcerated. "This is stuff that's not discussed," she said. "Inside, you're just trying to survive from day to day. There's not a lot of time to get into how it's affecting you. I've been home for almost two years, and I'm still sorting through." The reasons that American society sometimes overlooks the psychological and emotional turmoil wrought by imprisonment are various: political murk, economic pressures, lack of time. When it comes to the time issue, Ms. von Furstenberg, who doles out her physical energy watchfully because of her disease, seems particularly well equipped to shine a light on that which is lost in the blur of life's everyday demands.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
In Sharman's account, the dominance of the West (note Europe's easy baton pass to the United States), roughly from the Enlightenment to World War II, represents a historical blip in the last millennium. And, perhaps more important, today we seem to be on the cusp of a return to a more regular state of affairs, where the large states of Asia will again be the globe's hegemons. To make this provocative argument, Sharman finds the early modern period, conventionally dated from 1500 to 1800, the most fruitful for thinking about where we are headed. In those centuries, the enormous empires of the East the Qing, the Ottomans and the Mughals were the most formidable states on earth. Territory equaled power, and those states held the most land. Much of this book turns on Sharman's critique of what historians term the "military revolution thesis" the idea that advanced military technologies led to Europe's domination of the world beginning around 1500. Sharman shows this not to be true. For example, he dismantles the notion that the period of Western overseas expansion led to the rise of Europe, either militarily or politically. Asia's enormous land based empires didn't much care about their coastlines and tolerated more than they succumbed to the Europeans nibbling on their shores in what were desperate, highly risky and ultimately temporary ventures. Until approximately 1750, Europeans even in Europe, thanks to the Ottomans held no military advantage over other powers. But how then to explain the undeniable fact that Europeans dominated the globe from the turn of the 19th century to World War I? Sharman reasons that it was a combination of internal fractures within the Qing and Ottoman Empires, as well as the inclination of Europeans to think that empire building was the route to national sovereignty: in other words, almost a kind of vanity project. He might have said more about how exactly Europe achieved temporary global pre eminence, especially as it would bolster his argument that this was a deviation from the norm of the last millennium.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
SAN DIEGO Randy Arozarena was born in Arroyos de Mantua, a small town on the northwest coast of Cuba, a four and a half hour drive from Havana. He has fond memories of dancing in the streets and playing soccer, his first love, with his brothers and his friends. He remembers his father watching him play for the Vegueros de Pinar del Rio, a professional Cuban baseball team. His nickname is El Cohete Cubano ("The Cuban Rocket"). Make no mistake, Arozarena is Cuban. But deep down, his heart has become intertwined with the country only 30 minutes away from San Diego's Petco Park, where he has starred over the past two weeks and powered the Tampa Bay Rays into the World Series. Mexico is where Arozarena, 25, found a home after fleeing Cuba on a small boat five years ago, where his daughter was born two years ago and where he started a journey that vaulted him to the major leagues last year. And one day, he hopes to wear the country's uniform in international competitions. "I feel like I represent Mexico," he said in Spanish during a recent interview. "I have a daughter in Mexico, and I'd do it in honor of her and for the part of my career that I spent in Mexico, and for all the friends I've made in Mexico." Arozarena's experience is familiar to many of his fellow Cuban born players in Major League Baseball. The island is their homeland, but dozens have escaped the communist country to chase their dreams, often putting their lives in the hands of smugglers or taking harrowing boat rides. After Arozarena said his father died unexpectedly of an allergic reaction to shellfish in 2014 and he began feeling alienated by his team in Cuba he was left off Pinar del Rio's roster for the 2015 Caribbean Series in Puerto Rico despite hitting .291 as officials feared he might defect he decided that he needed to leave to provide for his mother and two younger brothers. "At 19, I earned more than my mom," Arozarena said. In his first season in Cuba, he said, he made 4 a month and then eventually 38 a month. So in June 2015, Arozarena said, he took an eight hour boat ride and saw waves over 15 feet en route to Isla Mujeres, just off the coast from Cancun. Defecting Cuban baseball players must establish residency in a third country before they can be cleared by the U.S. government and sign as free agents with an M.L.B. team. From where Arozarena lived in Cuba, Mexico was the shortest journey. The list of people he knew in Mexico upon his arrival: "No one." Through an agent, Arozarena was eventually connected to Guillermo Armenta, then a scout for the M.L.B. Scouting Bureau who also oversaw player development for the Toros de Tijuana of the Mexican professional baseball league. After being asked to train Arozarena a few more times, Armenta convinced him that he should come to Tijuana to develop at the Toros' academy, which had sent other prospects to major league organizations. At the academy, Armenta said, Arozarena had so little to his name that he shared cleats and batting gloves with another prospect during workouts. He grew frustrated as M.L.B. teams scouted him and gave him looks in private work outs but declined to sign him. One day, Armenta jokingly gave Arozarena what he thought was an impossible challenge: A team will sign you, he said, if you can walk on your hands from home plate to first base. Arozarena announced that he had done gymnastics in Cuba, flipped onto his hands and did it. "I thought, 'Wow, this kid is a super athlete,'" Armenta said. Arozarena made his major league debut with St. Louis on Aug. 14, 2019, and hit .300 in 20 at bats over 19 games. Tantalized by Arozarena's talent, the Rays traded for him, coughing up their top pitching prospect at the time. His Rays debut this year was delayed until Aug. 30 because of a positive coronavirus test. While isolating, he said, he loaded up on chicken and rice all he knew how to make and did 300 push ups a day. And although he wasn't an everyday player upon his return, he earned regular duties by hitting .281 with seven home runs in only 23 games. "He came here without anything that he has now," Armenta said from Tijuana in a phone interview. "But look at him now. That's Randy." In the postseason, Arozarena has been by far the best hitter in the Rays' offense. He blasted three home runs in five games to help topple the Yankees in the American League division series. And in a celebratory dance competition set to Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" after Tampa Bay won the series, Arozarena beat his teammate Brett Phillips by busting out the moves including spinning on his head that he used to do with his brothers and friends back in Cuba. It was the type of joy that has come to exemplify the Rays and Arozarena this postseason. "Life is too short," he said. "And that's what how we do it: enjoying every moment that life brings." "Everybody is just in awe every time he steps into the box," Rays catcher Mike Zunino said of Arozarena. Rays Manager Kevin Cash said Arozarena's accomplishments were more impressive given that he had no previous experience against many of the pitchers. Arozarena wouldn't be doing this if not for his formative time in Mexico. At the Toros' academy, he grew not only as a player but as a person. Teammates and staff members there helped him buy his first cellphone and open social media accounts (he is now active on Instagram and hosts Facebook chats with fans). Before the Rays swept Toronto in the best of three first round of the 2020 playoffs, Arozarena posed for a photo with a friend he hadn't seen since their days together at the Toros' academy: Alejandro Kirk, a Mexican catcher with the Blue Jays. "He's Mexican because of his love of the homeland," Armenta said of Arozarena. If Arozarena had his way, he would still play in the Mexican winter leagues, as he did for the Mayos de Navojoa in Sonora in three previous off seasons. He said he loves living in Merida because it is tranquil and the warm weather year round reminds him of his native island. His family is around, too: his brother, Raiko, plays for the Cafetaleros de Chiapas, a third tier Mexican soccer team, and his mother makes him Cuban food often although he still indulges in his favorite Mexican dish, carne asada tacos. "It's like living in Cuba," he said. But of course, Arozarena is not. The only bond he feels with his homeland, he said, is the family and friends he left behind and the little town where he was born "where everyone knows me and everyone loves me, and where they loved my dad and I'm proud of being from." He added that "the situation in Cuba is bad." Last year, President Trump reversed an agreement negotiated by the Obama administration in which M.L.B. and the Cuban Baseball Federation had eased the path for players to compete in the United States without defecting. Arozarena said he still hopes conditions will improve one day for all Cubans, including ballplayers. "There's a lot of Cuban players that want to represent Cuba, for example, in a World Baseball Classic or an important tournament, but because of politics, they can't," he said, adding later, "For my part, I wouldn't represent Cuba until everything changes." Until then, Arozarena has a few more goals: Win a World Series, have his mother watch him play in the major leagues in person, and become a Mexican citizen. He said he had already taken the citizenship test and was waiting to hear back in order to apply for a passport. He has time: The World Baseball Classic originally scheduled for 2021 was tentatively postponed two years because of the pandemic. "I'm Cuban, but it'd be an honor for me to represent Mexico," he said, "and for my daughter."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Anyone who remembers the 1970s Tippy the Turtle "Draw Me" advertisements on matchbooks, in magazines and on television would be amazed how much times have changed. Then, amateur artists would mail their submissions to the Art Instruction Schools in Minneapolis and could begin a correspondence class to learn still life drawing. These days, the digital world is booming with resources to help enthusiasts who want to become comic book professionals, learn the tools of the trade or improve their craft. Comics Experienceis an e business dedicated to teaching the core disciplines of making comics: writing, illustration, coloring and lettering. It was founded by Andy Schmidt. "This was a way I could combine my two loves teaching and comics," he said. Mr. Schmidt, 38, started the operation in 2007 as he was leaving a job as an editor at Marvel Comics. He began with two introductory classes comic book writing and art in a traditional classroom environment. In 2009, he took it online, and he now offers a rotation of 25 courses. But comic books are also a business, and that is another area where Comics Experience helps enrollees get prepared. In October, the course "Comic Book Law for Creators," led by Joe Sergi, a lawyer, was introduced. It offers an overview on contracts, defining terms like trademark and copyright and explaining the difference between projects that are creator owned (the creator earns the rewards) and those that are work for hire (the publisher is king). "It doesn't mean you shouldn't use a lawyer, but it'll give you the background to know what you're talking about when you do," Mr. Schmidt said. For those lucky enough to break into the industry and break out of the pack with a hit that draws the attention of television or film producers the rewards can be substantial. In 2013, overall sales of comics, whether single issues, collected editions or digital downloads, were 870 million, according to estimates on Comichron, an online resource for comics research. Digital sales were 90 million. The virtual classrooms at Comics Experience are set up differently depending on the course. Art classes use most of the screen to show illustrations. Writing workshops are less dynamic, primarily offering views of the instructor, unless students want to turn on their web cameras to see one another. All sessions are recorded and are available for review during the term of the class. Beginner courses cost 495 to 595 and run for six weeks. There are also occasional daylong "Master Seminars," for 295, where a comic book professional like the writer Peter David or the artist David Finch focuses on one topic. Comics Experience also has a Creators Workshop think of it as a development lab with a distribution deal tied to the comic publisher IDW. The first comic to come from this process, "Creature Cops" by Rob Anderson and Fernando Melek, had its premiere in January, and a collected edition of the three issue series is coming in June. Workshop members (who pay 30 a month or 150 for six) can submit, at least twice a year, material to be considered for publication. Some of the pricing can be prohibitive for those just starting, so the website also includes free how to podcasts and an archive of comic book scripts. Another free resource for would be professionals is the Comic Archive, whose founder, Mike Furth, 34, describes it as a virtual museum. The mission of the site is to capture how the comic industry is being transformed by digital innovation. "Comics didn't change the way they were made for 70 years. In the last 10 years, all of that has been upended," he said. "I wanted to start documenting the old way of doing it. That's why I call it an archive an archive of the process and the tools of the trade." The site has a collection of video interviews with writers, artists and editors about the comic book industry. Recent entries include interviews with Simon Fraser, the editor of Act I Vate Comix, a collective of online comics creators, and John D. Roberts, a founder of Comixology, the iTunes of comics, which allows creators to sell their work digitally. There have also been interviews about diversity in material and readership. The artist videos often have annotations to help viewers find the equipment being discussed. "Since I do focus a lot on tools and techniques, there are a large number of people who come to the site because they are themselves trying to learn to make comics," Mr. Furth said. One of the best places to find creators talking about their craft is social media, where followers can often receive a behind the scenes look at work in progress. Todd McFarlane, one of the founders of Image Comics, a company created in 1992 that became a model for creators retaining the financial rewards earned from their characters, is an active presence on Facebook. The posts vary among advance looks at pages from "Spawn" (his original creator owned series from Image, which continues today), promotion for his new toys or guest appearances and helpful hints (usually in capital letters and with multiple exclamation points) for budding artists. Last month, he critiqued his own pinup of Marvel's Iron Man with the introduction, "Here's an example of what not to do when sending in your comic book drawing for review." He explained that publishers want to see sequential storytelling ability, not just static poster shots. In January, he revealed the secret to his success: "Practice!!!!!" The daily repetition, Mr. McFarlane, 54, wrote, improved his abilities and gave him the confidence to submit his work to the publishers that gave him his first break. Even the "Draw Me" art test has moved online. The Art Instruction Schools has assessment and scholarship opportunities available at FreeArtTest.com, which began last October. One of the most famous graduates of the school, founded in 1914, is the "Peanuts" creator Charles M. Schulz, who enrolled as a student in 1940 and spent four years as an instructor. Many of the Peanuts characters were based on people he met there. Fittingly, he learned of the school through a "Draw Me" ad his mother found in a newspaper.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
HAMPTON, N.H. Over Independence Day weekend, a million vehicles cruised the Maine Turnpike, as Interstate 95 is known north of the Piscataqua River. It is impossible to say exactly how many of those cars first stopped at New Hampshire Liquor Wine Outlet No. 76, but a bit of regional vernacular "hella wicked many" will suffice for an estimate. New Hampshire has sold tax free liquor at state run shops since the repeal of Prohibition. No. 76 opened (on I 95 North, as convenient to passing motorists as a service plaza) in 1981, within the town limits of Hampton. "It was the No. 1 store within 12 months," said Joseph W. Mollica, chairman of New Hampshire liquor commission. "That was the flagship." With annual sales of 33.5 million, it remains the top grossing liquor store in New Hampshire. Most customers come from out of state. In summer, when Maine transforms into vacationland, they come in droves, and a rest stop emerges as a ritual institution. A promotional item sparkling at the entrance an Absolut vodka disco ball cooler sets a certain mood. At No. 76, provisioning is a party in its own right. Over three days at the start of the high season, I watched shoppers eagerly mass for an 8 a.m. opening and, hours later, sprint to make their closing time rendezvous with Jack Daniel's. I listened as they debated their purchases before winding to the eight checkout lanes, where people visiting their ancestors' coastal cottages lined up alongside those venturing to their friend of a friend's lake cabins. I encountered many compelling creatures, the best dressed being Lucy, a terrier mix wearing a patriotic leotard and tutu and occupying a shopping cart's child seat. Lucy's ensemble matched the star spangled bottles of Svedka vodka being snatched up by 20 somethings. Moreover, it suited the air of an establishment doubling as an 8,500 square foot storehouse of hopes for relaxation and refreshment. No. 76 is squarely committed to the pursuit of happiness, if happiness can be said to involve a bargain priced bottle of spiced rum carried with a studiously insouciant backhanded grip. According to Mr. Mollica's office, the average customer here spends 70.98 on 2.24 bottles of spirits and 2.15 bottles of wine. According to my own eyes, the average customer is rather extraordinary. In the parking lot, I met the Boston based chief executive of a bio tech firm who could only get away to Sebago Lake for one night. Nonetheless, he loaded into his Benz a half dozen bottles of cabernet sauvignon and a couple of nice tawny ports. I also met a boat builder from Plympton, Mass., who helmed a 1972 Winnebago towing the superlatively recreational vehicle of a campus safety golf cart repainted with the legend "Fun Police." Like the 10 bottle of gin bought by his wife, the golf cart would enliven their campground in the town of Arundel, Me. Inside, there was the variegated flavor of a way station and a charge of anticipation. Shoppers easing into their vacation personae checked themselves in the mirror of strangers' gazes. You could tell which women were from New York City by the clacks of their gait. You could tell which dudes were from Boston because their T shirts told you they were from Boston. You could tell the Canadians by their polite habit of conforming to stereotype. That Saturday afternoon found Marc Gilbert, a 49 year old consultant from Toronto, carefully tallying the wine bottles in his basket. He and his wife were selecting "just enough to last 30 days" of hosting in Kennebunk, Me. But the shelves teem with pleasant surprises (premixed Negronis!), odd novelties (six ounce goblets of chardonnay) and kitschy conveniences (Disaronno packaged with a lemon squeezer for your amaretto sour needs). Travelers laying virgin eyes on all this motley grandeur are commonly moved to speak the Lord's name. This adult beverage emporium is very much a family affair. A major theme of conversation more dominant even than the bittersweet recollections of Jagermeister phases or weary laments that the place sells no beer is What Grandma Wants. Does she require the merlot? The Bombay? Raspberry schnapps? "It's probably down here, Grandma, if you want the raspberry, 'cause I see 'fruit liqueur.'" So much deference is paid to Grandma's wishes that one begins to understand the North American vacation as a matriarchal ceremony fueled by Bailey's Irish Cream. A father explaining to his son that Grandma wanted extra dry Champagne tried to teach the boy the difference between extra dry and brut. His lesson was met with a wisecrack: "I normally like my liquids wet." The grandson's wryness is typical of his demographic's attitude to the spectacle, which tends to combine humble study of the bottles and amused derision for the language in which they come wrapped. One boy gave a dramatic reading of the tasting notes for a 3,700 bottle of scotch. "A rich toffee note develops, over a waxy mineral base that becomes beachlike as the assault grows," he intoned, to the giggles of siblings, as if the text had been installed specially for their entertainment, which maybe it had been. In due course, the lad may enjoy a site specific coming of age. Mike Dumont and Geoff Rybitski, cousins from Bethlehem, Pa., were headed to a family lake house near Bangor, Me., with Mr. Rybitski's girlfriend and, now, a moderate quantity of whiskey. "I'm 21," Mr. Dumont said. "I'm also 21," Mr. Rybitski added. "We go there every year, and this was the first year that we could buy." They had three to four more hours of driving ahead, but they glowed with the feeling of having arrived. I discovered a 38 year old schoolteacher idly strolling the aisles while his wife compared wines. He was far more sedate than the average customers who, stimulated by the festivity of the moment and the threat of thick traffic ahead, operated in a giddy low grade frenzy. He gave his name as Charlie, his home as Brooklyn, his destination as his parents' Deer Isle summer house. "It's nostalgic," Charlie said of his shopping trip. "I've been coming up to Maine since the mid '90s, and my dad used to print up, in the pre smartphone days, an itinerary with all the highway exits and rest stops, and he always listed this place. My mom did all the driving, and if she ever drove past it without stopping, he'd complain."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
At the start of "At the Hour," the hour appears to be early. Light is slowly dawning. Birds are beginning to chirp. A woman in a loose shift might be doing her morning exercises, bending and twisting with her feet in ballet positions, and if you watch her closely enough, you may soon be surprised to realize that she is not alone. Others have appeared some on the balconies that run along two sides of the stage area, some directly above your own head. On Wednesday Summation Dance presented the debut of "At the Hour" in the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Fishman Space, and the five year old company uses one aspect of the theater intrepidly. Many troupes have danced across the Fishman's balconies, but never before have I seen dancers traverse the cage like deck beneath the lighting grid, crawling around up there like monkeys in a rain forest canopy. This coup de theatre immediately gives the work a fresh perspective. Everything looks different when seen from below. That new point of view is welcome (and disappointingly short lived), as much of "At the Hour" resembles previous works by the company's choreographer, Sumi Clements. Here, again, a band of women gathers and disperses as if in some kind of danger. As Kyle Olson's score evolves ominously from natural sounds to industrial grinding and electronic beats, the women stare at one another intently, clump in low squats, explode into slicing motion and tilt their heads back. This time, however, Ms. Clements has found a more promising subject. According to publicity materials (but unmentioned in the written program), "At the Hour" is "inspired by prophetic events that took place in Garabandal, Spain, in the 1960s," a reference to young girls who claimed to have been visited by St. Michael and the Virgin Mary and whose prophecies foretold miracles and warned of punishment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
There is nothing particularly fiery about Tory Burch. Shortly after the 2004 debut of the fashion company that bears her name, Ms. Burch was profiled in The New York Times, with the reporter noting that if reserve could be bottled, Ms. Burch would probably "have a blockbuster fragrance." So it may come as something of a surprise that the campaign she was promoting on Tuesday morning by phone from her office in the Flatiron district does not have a couple of starlet models photographed by the ubiquitous Mario Testino, but is instead a stark, black and white video, a public service announcement that takes on a thorny issue that dominated the last presidential campaign and has divided people on the right and left. Making its debut next Wednesday, on International Women's Day, the campaign, called "Embrace Ambition," features Julianne Moore, Melinda Gates, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jamie Lee Curtis, Anna Wintour, Reese Witherspoon and other famous people (both male and female) talking in front of a scrim about reclaiming a word that has often been used to vilify women. "I can think of a lot of dirty words," Ms. Witherspoon says. "Ambition is not one of them." Nevertheless, she seemed to choose her words carefully as she spoke about the campaign. Although she designed a T shirt for Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful presidential run and has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic politicians over the last few years, she wanted to get away from the idea that this project was politically motivated, or anti Trump. She said repeatedly, almost apologetically, that she would like to do something that unites rather than divides the country. Also, she added, "I have lots of Republican friends," and "they want their daughters to have the same rights as men." But the issue of ambition, and the way it is used to defame women, is nevertheless personal to her. Ms. Burch grew up in Valley Forge, Pa. Her parents, Buddy and Reva Robinson, were a fashionably iconoclastic pair who vacationed in Morocco; celebrated Christmas, although Reva was Jewish; and rang a bell for dinner, like something out of a Willa Cather novel. "They taught us that with hard work we could achieve anything," she said of herself and her three brothers. "It was never about gender." Then, Ms. Burch attended the University of Pennsylvania and majored in art history. She moved to New York and became a fashion publicist who was often photographed on the charity circuit, attending benefits for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the American Ballet Theater. After she married a venture capitalist, J. Christopher Burch, who helped bankroll her company, the sniping started. (The couple divorced in 2006.) This was confusing to Ms. Burch, who never saw herself as being a particularly threatening person. On one hand, she is constantly telling her female employees not to say "maybe" and "I kind of think." On the other hand, she often uses those kinds of qualifiers herself. "I do it, too," she said. "I'm guilty of all of it." In 2009, Ms. Burch started the Tory Burch Foundation and, through a partnership with Bank of America, saw it grow to an organization that ultimately gave more than 25 million to female entrepreneurs around the world. Many of the recipients of these grants had experienced the same kind of sexism she faced. They were called too hungry, too intent on power, too ambitious code words used in place of the more vulgar expressions that men (and sometimes women, too) used when they were out of earshot. "There was a harmful double standard," she said. Ms. Burch said she decided to do the public service announcement long before Donald J. Trump was elected president, though the videos were shot in the last few weeks. And the campaign, which is coming out at a time when women's rights activists seem emboldened by the country's rightward turn, is intent on reclaiming the very descriptors that are frequently used derisively against them. In October, Mr. Trump called Mrs. Clinton a "nasty woman" during the third presidential debate, prompting Clinton surrogates like Katy Perry to begin wearing that phrase on T shirts, inside a heart, during fund raisers. In February, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, got into a dust up with Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, when she tried to give a speech against Senator Jeff Sessions's nomination for attorney general. He shot her down, saying: "She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted." Soon, "she persisted" became a hashtag with thousands of reposts on Twitter and Instagram by fans of Ms. Warren, who recast it as a show of strength and resolve. (Fittingly, Ms. Moore, the actress, appears in Ms. Burch's campaign, imploring young women to "be persistent.") And the word "feminist" began to shed its Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan connotations, as women like Madonna went from saying they are "not feminists" but "humanists" to wearing T shirts at anti Trump events that had the word "feminist" emblazoned across the center.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A bite size sampling of concours, cruise nights, auctions, club races and other upwellings of car culture happening across America this weekend: Maggie Valley Festival Grounds holds a meet celebrating all things petroleum, including gas pumps, vintage signs, toys and old license plates. Admission is 5, and children 12 and under get in free. More info. The show is open to all British cars and motorcycles, and the weekend's events at the aerodrome also include a history of flight display on Saturday and a World War I show on Sunday. More info. The Sprint Cup series is on hiatus this weekend, but there will be Nationwide series action at the Chicagoland Speedway on Saturday. Regan Smith leads the series with 611 points going into the 300 mile race, followed by Elliott Sadler, with 603 and Chase Elliott, who has 598. More info. The National Hot Rod Association takes to the Rockies on a dragstrip just west of Denver. At 5,800 feet above sea level, the Bandimere Speedway is a challenge to N.H.R.A. racing as teams tune cars and drivers to work their best at oxygen thin high altitude. More info.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. In New York, a 1 year old boy was fatally shot over the weekend, one of the latest victims in a surge of violence that has rattled an already traumatized city. As of Monday, New York City had had 634 shootings this year, up from 394 at the same time last year, according to Police Department data. The violence comes as the city emerges from some of the darkest, most tumultuous months in its history. Tens of thousands of people are dead from the coronavirus. Nearly one in five working age New Yorkers is out of a job. Faced with enormous suffering during a pandemic, a possible economic collapse and maybe the largest civil rights movement in history, a healthy police department could have acted as a balm. Many members of the New York Police Department work hard every day to do just that, putting their lives on the line alongside the city's nurses, Emergency Medical Services workers, mass transit employees and other essential workers. But too often in recent months, instead of a balm, the Police Department has become another source of trauma. It unleashed disproportionate force on crowds of overwhelmingly peaceful protesters, beating them with batons; punching, shoving and tackling them; and driving a police vehicle through a large group. Officers deployed pepper spray on unarmed civilians. In one case, an officer was caught on video removing the mask of a protester and pepper spraying him in the face. In another, officers pepper sprayed a sitting member of the State Senate at point blank range. The department made more than 2,500 arrests and held hundreds of people for over 24 hours without them seeing a judge. The Legal Aid Society has sued, arguing that the detentions violated a state law requiring arraignment within a day. Arrestees were also held in crowded, unsanitary jail cells at Police Headquarters and other locations in the midst of the pandemic. Scores of officers did not wear protective masks while on duty at the protests, violating policy and risking their health and the health of others, even after the department sometimes used aggressive tactics against civilians for the same offense, giving summonses to and arresting Black and Hispanic residents at higher rates than white residents. On May 13, officers tackled an unarmed Black woman in front of her young child for failing to properly wear her mask on the subway. Even as officers battled peaceful protesters in the streets, the department failed to prevent theft and the destruction of property in Midtown Manhattan, SoHo and the Bronx. Large numbers of officers at the protests covered their names and badge numbers while on duty, violating the police force's policies. The department also let officers refuse to show up at disciplinary hearings held over video chat. One of the city's police unions felt insulated enough from oversight that it posted private details about the arrest of Chiara de Blasio, the Black daughter of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who told her father she was arrested while peacefully protesting. The union publicly disclosed Ms. de Blasio's address, date of birth and driver's license on Twitter, a form of harassment known as doxxing. Chief Michael LiPetri, the chief of crime control strategies, said the force was working under difficult conditions that included protests, "rioting for three straight nights" and the illness of thousands of officers sickened during the worst of the city's coronavirus outbreak. Chief LiPetri said "there is never going to be one reason" crime increases. "I am not sitting here as the chief of crime control strategies in any way playing the blame game," he said in an interview. "The bottom line is: We are going to continue to address the biggest concern, and that is the violence in New York City streets." But the need to drastically remake the department didn't begin with the pandemic or the Black Lives Matter protests. For decades, the department has fiercely resisted, slow walked, co opted or simply blown past serious attempts at reform or independent oversight. In 1993, David Dinkins, New York City's first and only Black mayor, formed a civilian board to review police misconduct. But in the nearly three decades since, police commissioners have retained discretion to impose discipline, routinely rejecting the recommendations of the board. Also in 1993, the department first banned officers' use of chokeholds. Records show that the tactic continued to be used anyway, including in the 2014 death of Eric Garner. The department flouted a 2017 law passed by the City Council that required it to release demographic data about people who were arrested or given civil summonses for fare evasion. A State Supreme Court judge ordered the department to release the data last year after Councilman Rory Lancman, the bill's lead sponsor, sued. The department opposed attempts to rein in the practice known as stop and frisk, arguing that doing so would cause crime to rise. That turned out to be wrong. More recently, Dermot Shea, the commissioner, has attributed the increase in shootings this year to a state law that went into effect Jan. 1 banning bail for those charged with most misdemeanor and nonviolent offenses, as well as to the release of thousands of people from the city's jail system during the pandemic. Reporting last week in The New York Post hardly a bastion of antipolice sentiment found that the force's own data showed otherwise. Of the 11,000 people released from custody under the bail law, according to The Post, one had been charged with a shooting as of last Wednesday. Over the past three decades, the department has helped keep New York one of the safest big cities in America. Yet it also has lost the confidence of many New Yorkers and is ripe for sweeping reform. Much of that work will be a feat for New York's next mayor. Mayor de Blasio, who has shown little appetite or mettle to bring real oversight to the police, is term limited, with just a year and a half left in office. Until then, the bulk of this important work will have to be done by the City Council. Last month, the Council approved several police reform bills, including one requiring officers to show their names and badge numbers and another making it illegal for officers to use tactics that restrict someone's airflow. Over the coming year, its members will have to do more. Good places to start would be by holding more public hearings on the department's response to the Black Lives Matter protests and by examining questions like whether officers have engaged in a work slowdown, something officials have denied. In the coming months, the Council will need to stand up not only to the city's police unions, but also to a mayor uninterested in spending his final year in office fighting with the police. For example, the mayor long opposed criminalizing chokeholds. This week, he is expected to sign the bill, after years of pressure from activists, the Council and now protesters. "He can't be trusted to do the job, and so the Council has to fill the role," Councilman Rory Lancman, the bill's lead sponsor, said. Mr. de Blasio's press secretary, Bill Neidhardt, said, "The mayor is interested in leading on police reforms as he has been for his years in office." For years, New York's police officials and far too many of its officers have met demands for independent oversight with defiance. Overhauling the Police Department may be the only way to stop the violence, and give New York the policing it deserves.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
It's good to hear the music of the American composer Lou Harrison at New York City Ballet. His sense of instrumental color, his feeling for both folk vitality and Asian delicacy, his modernist adaptations of classic forms always rinse the aural palate. On Wednesday at the David H. Koch Theater, City Ballet gave the New York premiere of a 14 minute pas de deux by Jean Pierre Frohlich set to Harrison's Varied Trio for piano, violin and percussion. This is a wonderful score, touching and imaginative, with strong suggestions of Asian melody and meter, gamelan like sonorities and marvelous changes of tone. Alan Moverman (piano), Kurt Nikkanen (violin) and James Baker (percussion) played it with relish and charm. (One of its five movements is omitted.) Mr. Frohlich is not known as a choreographer; he is one of City Ballet's ballet masters, with particular responsibility for the works of Jerome Robbins. This pas de deux "Varied Trio (in four)" had its premiere last year in Jackson Hole, Wyo.; Sterling Hyltin and Amar Ramasar danced it beautifully on Wednesday. It returns to repertory next May, but only, alas, for a single performance. Whereas many so called pas de deux give all the pas (steps) to the woman, "Varied Trio" often gives them to the man, too. There's a marvelous, extended passage in which Ms. Hyltin and Mr. Ramasar dance different solos at the same time in separate parts of the stage, with Mr. Ramasar starting center stage and facing front while Ms. Hyltin, upstage left, begins by facing the back. Now that we've seen them as independent agents, there's a new sense of occasion when they meet up again for partnering.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
SHANGHAI China released several government measures on Wednesday aimed at curbing the growth of housing prices and preventing a property bubble from threatening its fast growing economy. The State Council, China's cabinet, ordered cities to better manage the supply of land, raise tax rates on the sale of apartments or houses held for less than five years and set price control goals for new homes. The government also said it would raise the minimum down payment for buyers of second homes to 60 percent from 50 percent. The measures were released on the council's Web site late Wednesday, after a meeting led by the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, China's top economic planner. The announcement represents Beijing's latest attempt to gain some control over one of the nation's most contentious issues: the affordability of housing and the prospect that soaring property prices could endanger the country's economic boom. In its release, the government said that its policies were already working and that surging property prices had been "contained since last April." But challenges remained in a market that the government said was being driven up by speculators, the release said. Several major Chinese cities, including Shanghai and Chongqing, are considering experimenting with a property tax that would be aimed at speculators and help reduce the reliance on land sales for income. For much of the last six years, housing prices have skyrocketed in China's coastal cities and even in inland provinces as the country has embarked on a major urbanization drive. In Shanghai, for instance, some apartments are selling for the equivalent of 10 million. The steady rise in housing prices has created a scramble by developers to acquire land. Many of China's newly minted billionaires are real estate developers. But even state owned companies are snapping up large tracts of land as speculative investments or to build luxury high rises. Beijing is increasingly worried about developers, often assisted by local governments, who illegally confiscate land, and about the growing anxiety among the public about the loss of affordable housing. Beijing also worries that its major state owned banks could be at risk if the property market collapsed. The government has announced plans to build more affordable housing in major cities, but it has had only minor success in preventing property prices from rising. Government controls have seemed only to slow the rise of housing prices temporarily over the last six years. And then, after a while, they start soaring again. Many buyers believe that the government will not get too tough on the market because local governments depend on land sales for a significant portion of their income, so they have a strong incentive to keep prices high. Last year, according to the government, nationwide land sales rose 70 percent, to more than 400 billion. In its announcement on Wednesday, the government said it would set up an accountability mechanism and further regulate and control the property market.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Like the few other pinpricks of light scattered throughout the movie, the trattoria is a vestige of a resilient communal spirit that has survived despite conspicuous neglect and abuse. Something has been gnawing on the bones of this place, and it isn't long before Garrone introduces a possible suspect, Simone (Edoardo Pesce). A former boxer who still keeps his fists up, Simone is the local bully. He doesn't seem to have a job beyond an occasional heist; his only apparent interest is brutalizing anyone who gets in his way. For some reason, he tends to gravitate to Marcello, or at least to the snorts of cocaine that the little man eagerly procures for him. It's a worrisome relationship something has got to give and Garrone teases this volcanic threat for much of the movie. Simone is a brute, a monster with bared teeth. But much like the slavering, ferocious looking dog that enters barking in the opening shot, and which Marcello gently soothes into submission, Simone seems containable. And for a long while, Marcello manages to keep him and his violence in check. Mostly, he just goes along with Simone's persistent demands, an acquiescence that shapes the episodic narrative as Marcello unhappily takes the wheel during a robbery, tags along to a dance club and reluctantly joins Simone on a cocaine run. Garrone likes big, bold, graphically precise images that grab the eye and do the work that's often done by dialogue in other movies. The snarling dog announces Simone, who in turn embodies an unchecked malignancy. Simone, it's clear, is terrible. Yet there's nothing that he does, including beating others to a pulp, that is as horrific as the scene in which Marcello sits with neighborhood men who discuss having Simone assassinated. One has recently been assaulted by him; others soon will be. Seated at their usual trattoria table, the men seem so calm, sober. And as they discuss their problem and a potential remedy, you see how easily rationalized violence turns a group into a mob. Social realism in a symbolist key, "Dogman" is at times more pleasurable to look at than to experience, because it's so deterministic and because there's so little ordinary feeling beyond Marcello's uncomplicated love for his daughter, neighbors and dogs. Garrone is a virtuoso of pain and terror, which can be overwhelming, despite the flourishes of comedy. He also likes to go loud, and he consistently pushes into hyperbole, as when he comically emphasizes the difference between Marcello's size and a much larger dog he grooms. The contrast is funny. But what makes the image linger isn't how it fits into the movie's controlling metaphor but the everyday gentleness of one creature tending to another.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Each Saturday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week's news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Mike: Good day, Farhad! It is yet another rainy week in the Bay Area, which is really starting to make me question why I moved from New York to California. I always thought that by regularly selling my plasma to make rent, I'd at least have a year round deep tan to go with it. Maybe I should start using bronzer? Farhad: Wait, you don't already use a bronzer? I thought that was the explanation for the stains you left on my car seats after I gave you a ride home that one time. By the way, you owe me 200 in auto detailing. Mike: Yes, well, I'll Venmo you later. And I told you never to speak of that again. So, onto the news. This week was basically another Trump news week, which left very little oxygen in the room for technology. But Mark Zuckerberg, who has essentially declared himself president of the internet, decided to post a near 6,000 word State of the Union style essay about Facebook, something he apparently worked on during his nights and weekends for some time. Farhad: If I were a billionaire, I would not be spending my free time writing. I would be creating one of those Iron Man suits, but more fashionable. Maybe that's just me. Mike: Yeah, when I hear the word "Farhad" the first thing I think of is definitely Tony Stark. Anyway, his essay was quite a heave to read, so I'll give everyone the CliffsNotes version: Connecting people is great, Facebook isn't the government but kind of wants to help create new forms of governance, and also here are a bunch of ideals and half cemented plans that we may roll out some time in the future. Make sense to you? Farhad: Kind of? I read the document less for its substance and more for what it signaled. For years, tech leaders have been arguing that social networks could usher in big changes in the world, and they were quite prepared to take credit when those changes looked broadly popular to the Davos set for instance, the Arab Spring. I see Zuck's manifesto as a realization that social networks change things in unpredictable and sometimes manifestly not so great ways, and so as a result, Facebook needs to think more deeply about its effects. A C.E.O. trying to tackle the reverberations of his company's product? I can't complain about that, even if it's later than many would have liked. Mike: Hmm, you're being more thoughtful than usual. I'm watching you, Mister. I think it's worth mentioning that this is as close as we've come to seeing Mark give some sort of political statement in a rather charged environment. Even his company's mission to connect the world is now a polarizing idea. One could argue that deep currents of isolationism have run throughout nations over the history of mankind. And as many Trump supporters would argue, there are reasons for borders, even far before the internet ever existed. I think a lot of this depends on whether you buy into the idea that Facebook can ultimately be a uniting force for good in the world, or whether you think it will end up further polarizing us. Farhad: It will never polarize you and me, Mike. Etsy opened what it calls Etsy Studio, where it wants everyone at home with a spool of yarn and a bag of beads to start selling crafts online. This is just in time for your side business, "crocheting with Farhad," to really take off. Congrats! Farhad: You forgot to mention that it's steampunk crochet. This will make me rich. Mike: Twitter looks as if it will start chopping the advertising products that don't really work, which is probably a good thing if the company is all about focus and becoming profitable these days. It's all you hear on every company earnings call. Farhad: Killing things that aren't working seems like a good idea. Speaking of which, our editors have been wanting to chat with you. Mike: Here's the topic du jour I really wanted to get to: The fall of PewDiePie. So if you're over the age of 18, you may not actually know who PewDiePie is. In a nutshell: He is Felix Kjellberg, one of the world's most popular video game live streamers on the internet. He's amassed an enormous following on YouTube, where he essentially films himself playing video games and talking to the camera. I've watched him before for the entire length of him beating a video game and it's actually captivating and somewhat intimate, like he's having an extended discussion with you. He's made millions of dollars doing it, too. Well, that happy arc ended this week, when The Wall Street Journal published a series of stories going back into PewDiePie's history of video streams, highlighting a series of anti Semitic acts that have occurred over the last year. Kjellberg maintains they were off color jokes that went too far. But that didn't stop Disney and YouTube from severing ties with the guy, cutting short his multimillion dollar contracts. So I'm curious. What do you think this episode says about online gamer culture? A ton of folks are coming to Kjellberg's aid after this whole thing, saying that The Journal has blown the whole thing out of proportion. Do you buy that? Farhad: Well, if by "blown out of proportion" he means they accurately reported that he's repeatedly invoked Nazi imagery and recently paid some folks to hold up a sign saying "Death to All Jews," then I guess that's right! But I suspect PewDiePie is not ignorant of online culture. You don't get to be YouTube's biggest star without understanding the racist underbelly of the internet. It's perfectly fine, in some online circles, to say terrible things about others and then to laugh it off as just a meaningless joke that only offends humorless "snowflakes." It seems obvious that PewDiePie was playing with that. The bigger question for me is how the big sponsors of these stars of tomorrow companies like Google and Disney change how they vet people like PewDiePie. Tomorrow's celebrities are going to come from the internet culture. To older folks running these media companies, internet celebs are going to look and sound totally off the wall, but the execs are going to feel pressure to sign them based on their huge popularity. It seems clear no one at Disney was actually paying attention to PewDiePie the Nazi stuff was out there for everyone to see, and Disney responded only once The Journal came calling. So perhaps that will be the first fix here: actually paying attention to the internet celebs you've paid so handsomely.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
From left, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam at a "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" screening during the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. When Terry Jones went to work, he wore the robes of a Spanish inquisitor, the jacket of a French waiter and the business attire of a man selling crunchy frogs. And long after he and the other members of Monty Python set off on separate paths, he took on new roles as a director and historian, among others. After his death on Tuesday, many prominent admirers recalled how he had touched their lives. "Farewell, Terry Jones. The great foot has come down to stamp on you," wrote the actor Stephen Fry on Twitter, alluding to the cartoon foot that crashed through many Monty Python sketches. "My god what pleasure you gave, what untrammelled joy and delight." The director Edgar Wright began to list some of Mr. Jones's most famous characters, like one of the Hell's Grannies and Nigel Incubator Jones. The comedian John Oliver called him "the absolute best." The actor Mark Gatiss said he was "a cornerstone of my growing up." Many Python fans know the lines he delivered by heart, from the sales pitch of a crunchy frog salesman ("only the finest baby frogs, dew picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly killed") to a mother's scorn after her son is mistaken for divine ("He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy"). In his post Python career, Mr. Jones worked on documentaries about the Middle Ages, screenwriting, children's books and a Norse saga of his own, but it was the legacy of Monty Python that dominated tributes to him. The living Pythons quickly spoke out after hearing the news of Mr. Jones's death, including his close friend and frequent writing partner, Michael Palin. "He was far more than one of the funniest writer performers of his generation," Mr. Palin told Britain's Press Association. "He was the complete Renaissance comedian: writer, director, presenter, historian, brilliant children's author, and the warmest, most wonderful company you could wish to have." Another former Python, Eric Idle, wrote on Twitter: "I loved him the moment I saw him onstage at the Edinburgh Festival in 1963. So many laughs, moments of total hilarity onstage and off we have all shared with him." Mr. Jones announced in 2016 that he had primary progressive aphasia, a neurological disease, and Mr. Idle seemed to allude to the condition. "It's too sad if you knew him," he said, "but if you didn't you will always smile at the many wonderfully funny moments he gave us." The American member, Terry Gilliam, wrote on Twitter that Mr. Jones "was someone totally consumed with life" and "a brilliant, constantly questioning, iconoclastic, righteously argumentative and angry but outrageously funny and generous and kind human being." John Cleese, speaking to BBC Radio on Wednesday, said that Mr. Jones brought an "endless energy and enthusiasm" to everything he did. "He got up one day when we were shooting on the south coast," Mr. Cleese said, "and he got excited about how green the grass was." He also had a confidence to direct, to argue, to take on something new that Mr. Cleese said he envied. "'Life of Brian' was his masterpiece," he said, referring to the Python film that Mr. Jones directed alone. On Twitter, he called it "perfection." Mr. Jones had several parts in the film, including as a hermit whose vow of silence is cut short by a stubbed toe, and as Brian's mother, who struggles to dismiss a crowd of adorers with a simple message: "Shove off." But Mr. Cleese said he would remember Mr. Jones as Mr. Creosote, a character whose titanic appetite makes him swell like a balloon. (Mr. Jones also directed the sketch, which ends poorly for his character.) "I shall think of him exploding," Mr. Cleese said. Though Mr. Jones and Mr. Cleese did not often write together, they shared some of the group's most memorable sketches, like one in which Mr. Jones plays a confectioner who is delighted to sell chocolate covered frogs. Mr. Cleese, playing a policeman, is appalled. "Don't you even take the bones out?" So is Mr. Jones's businessman. "If we took the bones out it wouldn't be crunchy, would it?" Mr. Jones also brought a distinct historical sensibility to the group, which was reflected in the sketches he wrote and his future as a scholar of Chaucer and the Middle Ages. He wrote one sketch about Elizabethan pornography smugglers, and another, set during World War II, in which a joke is so funny it becomes a superweapon, banned by the Geneva Conventions, and even deadlier in German. His style of writing long, with visual flair and often wildly over the top was wholly his own, Mr. Cleese said. "That was not something that any of the rest of us could do."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
"How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System": That subtitle is the opening shot across the bow in this jeremiad of a book by the psychiatrist Dr. E. Fuller Torrey. It could just as well have read: "How a group of well intentioned, starry eyed idealists made a hash of mental health care." You could hardly blame them for trying, though. The care of people with serious mental illness was long a national disgrace. By the 1950s, slightly more than half a million psychiatric patients resided in overcrowded and underfunded state mental hospitals, often under appalling conditions. Enter a group of high minded psychiatrists with a vision to "create a brave new world, a mentally healthy America," in Dr. Torrey's words. Armed with little more than optimism, they helped start the National Institute of Mental Health and set in motion an ambitious agenda for the next half century: closing the state mental hospitals, initiating a federal takeover of the mental health system, and creating a nationwide network of community mental health centers. Reform was well underway when President John F. Kennedy endorsed this new era in mental health in a 1963 speech, calling for a "bold new approach" in which "reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolation will be supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and capability." Those were heady days in American psychiatry, when psychoanalysis and the mental hygiene movement held sway and promised to cure all manner of ills by early intervention and improving the social environment. In hindsight, the therapeutic zeal of these professionals was impressively naive: They were certain that severely mentally ill patients in state hospitals many living there for decades would magically adjust to the community and do well with outpatient treatment. How wrong they proved to be. The sorry tale of what happened to the half million Americans who were deinstitutionalized over the past 50 years is the subject of this unsparing and lively takedown of American psychiatry by Dr. Torrey, a longtime critic of national mental health policy and the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center. Deinstitutionalization itself was not the problem. The discharge of hundreds of thousands of mental patients from state hospitals was a broadly humane measure, made possible by the effectiveness of new antipsychotic medicines like Thorazine. The egregious error was the failure to provide treatment to patients after they left the hospital. AMERICAN PSYCHOSIS How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System. By E. FullerTorrey, M.D. Oxford University Press. 224pages. 27.95. The idea that community mental health centers could supplant state mental hospitals was little more than a fantasy. The N.I.M.H.'s own data showed that these centers were largely treating not people with severe mental illness, but those with "social maladjustment or no mental disorder" better known as the worried well. Tragically, vast numbers of deinstitutionalized patients ended up in jails and prisons, in nursing homes or homeless on our streets. Some law enforcement agencies have become de facto mental health systems, and at least one third of homeless people have serious mental illness. The capacity of some of these individuals for violence, of course, has received lurid and sensational focus in the media, and Dr. Torrey does not shy away from recounting one horror story after another. It's true that effective treatment for mental illness would probably decrease violence in the community. But because only 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness, even giving all of them the best psychiatric treatment would have a very small effect on violence over all. Late in the book, Dr. Torrey finally gets around to putting the risk in perspective, but by then the force of all his anecdotes has only served to exaggerate it. Curiously, he does not explore the possibility that better psychiatric treatment might well reduce the risk of suicide: A vast majority of people who commit suicide, in contrast to homicide, do have a diagnosable and treatable psychiatric illness. Dr. Torrey's solutions for our broken mental health care system are mostly thoughtful, though not everyone will like them. Aside from increasing the number of public psychiatric hospitals, he would lower the bar for involuntary treatment. "The freedom to be insane is a cruel hoax," he writes, "perpetrated on those who cannot think clearly by those who will not think clearly." After the mass shootings of the past decade or so, the public may well agree with him. But the risk of lowering the threshold to involuntary treatment could be to discourage people with mental illness from seeking help in the first place. Few will disagree with his advice that we should focus our resources on the most problematic patients the estimated 10 percent who are repeatedly hospitalized, imprisoned, or made homeless. This wise and unflinching book is an object lesson in good intentions gone awry on a grand scale. It should be widely read.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
That is the sarcastic undercurrent at the annual motor show here, as executives survey the damage that Volkswagen's diesel cheating scandal has inflicted on the industry particularly on its plans to keep pace with stricter emissions regulations. Although diesel generates more harmful nitrogen oxide pollution than does gasoline, diesel engines produce less carbon dioxide, a cause of global warming. Carmakers saw diesel which accounts for more than half of the vehicles sold in Europe as essential to meeting the Continent's tougher carbon dioxide quotas. "We cannot fulfill European CO standards without diesel," Harald Kruger, the chief executive of BMW, said in an interview at the Geneva International Motor Show. The scandal, which prompted the company to put on a more demure exhibition here than usual, has also unsettled regulatory officials and made it more difficult to get approval for new vehicles, Dieter Zetsche, the chief executive of Daimler, said in Geneva. "We see situations where you get more questions and things are somewhat slowed down," he said during a meeting with reporters. Mr. Zetsche declined to say what countries he was referring to. Carmakers say they have the technology to allow their vehicles to pass emissions tests under a broader range of driving conditions. But cars with diesel engines will become more costly as manufacturers add extra hardware to neutralize nitrogen oxides, which are linked to serious lung ailments. European limits on nitrogen oxides, which were not only less strict but also less strictly enforced than in the United States, were set to become more stringent even before the Volkswagen cheating became known. "Diesel will have to be equipped with even more technology," said Peter Schwarzenbauer, a member of the BMW management board responsible for sales. "That is all technologically conceivable, but someone has to pay for it." If carmakers sell fewer diesels, they will have to find other ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. European regulations require carmakers to cut those emissions, averaged among all the vehicles they sell, 40 percent by 2021 compared to 2007 levels. Plug in hybrids and all electric vehicles will help, but so far consumer demand is slack. "We have electric vehicles today," Barb J. Samardzich, chief operating officer for Ford of Europe, said during a meeting with journalists. "What we don't have is consumer pull." She and other auto executives said that governments should provide incentives to get customers to buy battery powered cars. European policy has long favored diesel because of its superior fuel economy. Diesel engines extract more energy from a liter of fuel than a gasoline engine extracts from the same quantity. A car that uses fuel more efficiently also produces less carbon dioxide. In Germany, diesel fuel costs about 20 euro cents less per liter than gasoline because of lower taxes. As a result, diesel has been particularly attractive for buyers of larger luxury cars that consume more fuel. About three quarters of the cars sold in Europe by BMW and Audi, a Volkswagen brand, are diesels. "The European industry is dangerously dependent on diesel," Ferdinand Dudenhoffer, a professor at the University of Duisburg Essen in Germany, wrote in a study published last week. By contrast, in the United States, federal taxes on diesel are higher than for gasoline. The higher tax has been seen as a way of charging the trucking industry, heavy users of diesel, for the extra burden they put on highways. The price of diesel helps explain why diesel vehicles that run on it account for a tiny percentage of the cars that BMW and Mercedes Benz sell in America; the scandal is unlikely to affect their sales very much in the United States. The same cannot be said of Volkswagen. The company aggressively marketed diesel in the United States and other countries, targeting the same environmentally conscious buyers who might otherwise have bought a hybrid like a Toyota Prius. That strategy collapsed after Volkswagen acknowledged that it had programmed cars to recognize when they were being tested and to screen out more emissions. At other times, the cars' nitrogen oxide emissions were many times higher than is allowed. The carmaker said on Wednesday that the former chief executive was given a memo in May 2014 that contained information about irregularities in the emissions of its diesel cars, well over a year before Volkswagen made its public admission. The company is now struggling to reach agreement with United States and California officials on how to fix about 600,000 vehicles under its Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche brands that are on the road and still emitting illegal levels of nitrogen oxides. A United States District Court judge in San Francisco, who is overseeing class action suits against Volkswagen, has given the company until March 24 to provide a definite answer on how it would bring the cars into compliance. In a reflection of its battered public image, Volkswagen made a show of humility in Geneva this year. It did not stage one of the elaborate presentations that typically precede the opening of a major car show, and for which Volkswagen had been known. In past years, the Volkswagen extravaganzas have featured laser light shows, a parade of new car models, and surprise appearances by pop stars like Pink or the Pet Shop Boys. This year, Volkswagen had a more modest reception in a dining space adjacent to the exhibition hall. The only people on stage were Matthias Muller, the chief executive, and Johann Jungwirth, a former Apple executive whom Volkswagen hired in November to oversee its digital strategy. Mr. Jungwirth described a rosy future of self driving, emissions free electric cars, but whether that future will arrive soon enough to fill the gap left by diesel is questionable. Volkswagen and other automakers say that, by the end of the decade, battery powered cars will be available that can travel about 300 miles on a single charge, and will be able to recharge in 15 or 20 minutes at high voltage charging stations. Porsche has shown a prototype of an electric sports sedan, the Mission E, that it plans to introduce in 2020. Although the cost of batteries is falling, electric vehicles will still be substantially more expensive than comparable diesel cars for some time to come, and carmakers say they cannot sell large numbers of them without government help. "We know that the cost of batteries will go down in the future," Thierry Koskas, executive vice president for sales at the French carmaker Renault, said in an interview. "But we are not today in a situation where you can match the total cost of ownership of diesel without incentives. We need incentives."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Evoking Manhattan's past with a strikingly modern vision, the Whitney Museum of American Art unveiled designs on Wednesday night for a massive, airy sculpture by David Hammons crossing into the Hudson River a project that would be one of the largest public art installations in New York. Whitney officials presented the plans to a committee of the local community board, the first step in a delicate process of building support for an endeavor that would alter Hudson River Park and potentially raise environmental questions. The committee unanimously approved the plans after hearing from members of the neighborhood and others, who mostly expressed praise for the Hammons work. "I love this project," said Florent Morellet, a prominent former restaurateur in the neighborhood. "It's history and contemporary art." The artwork, "Day's End," an expansive frame of brushed stainless posts, would sit along the edge of Pier 52, known as Gansevoort Peninsula, and extend south into the water. During the comment portion of the committee meeting, a few residents questioned whether garbage would collect in the water around the artwork's poles the Whitney said it would evaluate that and whether there would be information on site about the history of the pier (the Whitney said it would provide material through signage and an app). The committee, which handles parks and waterfront issues, agreed to make sure the artwork would not impinge on the pier's parkland. The plan will now go before the full board later this month. One resident, who said he'd lived on Gansevoort Street since 1969, likened it to a "resurrection" of the old Pier 52, which was used in the shipping industry before becoming a sanitation and parking facility. It was Mr. Hammons himself who proposed the project, said Adam Weinberg, the Whitney's director, as he made a presentation to the committee. The museum had not been seeking an installation, but after Mr. Hammons toured its new building and looked out over the Hudson, he sent the museum a sketch of his proposed sculpture. "Is this a provocation? Is it a proposal? Is it a gift?" Mr. Weinberg recalled wondering at the time. "We got in touch with David and his manager and said, 'We'd love to talk to you about this.'" Whitney officials worked over the last year on conceiving and evaluating the project with Guy Nordenson, a structural engineer. Although the museum would raise money to support the installation's construction and maintenance costs that have yet to be determined the Whitney does not own the land and would not own the artwork. Instead, the installation would belong to Hudson River Park Trust, which would maintain it with Whitney funds. The two have yet to forge a formal agreement, though the trust has approved the project in principle. It was important to the Whitney to brief local residents about the project first, Mr. Weinberg said although the news leaked in advance given the opposition faced by another project in the river, Barry Diller's proposed island at Pier 55, which was scuttled last month. Indeed, Mr. Weinberg's presentation had all the oomph and charm of a salesman trying to avoid the pitfalls of the Diller project, which was opposed largely on environmental grounds. Mr. Weinberg stressed that the Hammons project's poles would be made of "the thinnest possible material" (eight inches in diameter, he said) and that the installation's impact on the area would be "the lightest touch possible." "There are essentially no shadows, it's completely open to the light, to the air," he said, adding: "It is a kind of ghost monument. You have a sense that this is something that was always there, yet it sort of disappears." "It will not impose on any uses of the Gansevoort Peninsula you can still have baseball fields, you can still have park," he added. "It's one of the biggest public sculptures in New York, yet takes up almost no mass whatsoever." Given that the Whitney was founded by an artist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and that so many artists live in the neighborhood, Mr. Weinberg said the Hammons project is also symbolic of the museum's close relationship with artists. Mr. Hammons, 74, has lived in New York for some 40 years, and "worked his way through the art world at a time when it was not so easy for an African American artist to make his career," Mr. Weinberg said. Showing slides of Mr. Hammons work, Mr. Weinberg described him as "one of the greatest living American artists." Mr. Hammons himself did not attend Wednesday's meeting, though his manager, Lois Plehn, was present. The artist is famously private he rarely talks to the press and independent. He is not represented by a commercial gallery and often turns down invitations from major museums interested in mounting exhibitions of his work. The project would rest on 12 pilings spaced 65 feet apart five of them on the peninsula, with a sixth out at the end and another six in the water. It would not be lit at night. "At the end of the day," Mr. Weinberg said, "the piece disappears into the darkness."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
It is manifestly unfair to compare the work of a near universally admired auteur to an odd, ambitious independent film, but "Knives and Skin" owes so much to David Lynch, particularly "Twin Peaks," that it feels wrong to pretend it exists in a vacuum. The ingredients are similar enough to be distracting: dead (or at least presumed dead) teenage ingenue; moody jock; tenderhearted sheriff; a 1950s style waitress; affectless line readings; scoring that resembles Angelo Badalamenti's "Mysteries of Love" from "Blue Velvet." Add these together, and they give the impression of a secondhand sensibility, as if the writer director, Jennifer Reeder, a visual artist who has turned to narrative cinema, were exorcising another filmmaker's demons rather than her own.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. Crisis often brings out the best in a people. As the coronavirus spreads its devastation, countless Americans are stepping up to perform acts of heroism and compassion, both great and small, to aid their neighbors and their nation. Then there are certain not so inspiring members of the United States Senate. Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, and Kelly Loeffler, Republican of Georgia, are in the hot seat this week, facing questions about whether they misused their positions to shield their personal finances from the economic fallout of the pandemic, even as they misled the public about the severity of the crisis. According to analyses of their disclosure reports filed with the Senate, the lawmakers each unloaded major stock holdings during the same period they were receiving closed door briefings about the looming pandemic. These briefings were occurring when much of the public still had a poor grasp of the virus, in part because President Trump and many Republican officials were still publicly playing down the threat. Instead of raising their voices to prepare Americans for what was to come, Mr. Burr and Ms. Loeffler prioritized their stock portfolios, in a rank betrayal of the public trust and possibly in violation of the law. It is unclear precisely what information about the pandemic either Mr. Burr or Ms. Loeffler received in the briefings before their stock sales. But any use of nonpublic information in guiding such dealings would have been not only unethical but almost certainly illegal. Lawmakers and their aides are explicitly barred from using nonpublic information for trades by the STOCK Act of 2012 (the acronym stands for Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge). Mr. Burr of all people should know this, since he was one of only three senators to vote against the bill. As chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Mr. Burr is privy to classified information about threats to America's security. In February, his committee was receiving regular briefings about the coronavirus. He is also a member of the Health Committee, which, on Jan. 24, co sponsored a private coronavirus briefing by top administration officials for all senators. On Feb. 13, Mr. Burr began a series of stock sales, according to an investigation by ProPublica, which found that, in 33 separate transactions, he unloaded "between 628,000 and 1.72 million of his holdings," including significant investments in three hotel chains. Unlike his previous disclosure reports, which showed a mix of selling and buying, these transactions were all sales. Mr. Burr's public comments during this period were more bullish. In a Feb. 7 opinion piece for Fox News, he and his co author, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a Republican, boasted of how well Congress and the Trump administration had prepared America to deal with whatever public health threats came its way. To be fair, the senator did give at least a few of his constituents a heads up. At a Feb. 27 private luncheon with business and community leaders from North Carolina, he warned that the virus stood to cause major upheaval. "There's one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history," he said, according to a recording obtained by NPR. "It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic." He told his audience to prepare for travel disruptions, school closings and other shocks to the system. On Thursday, Mr. Burr unleashed a Twitter thread accusing NPR of misrepresenting his speech in a "tabloid style hit piece." He did not mention his stock dump. Mr. Burr's spokesman has since offered up a defense that sounds more like a confession, noting that Mr. Burr filed disclosures on transactions made "several weeks before the U.S. and financial markets showed signs of volatility due to the growing coronavirus outbreak." Ms. Loeffler, who also sits on the Health Committee, is in a similarly sticky situation. On the very day of the committee's coronavirus briefing, she began her own stock sell off, as originally reported by The Daily Beast. Over the next three weeks, she shed between 1,275,000 and 3.1 million worth of stock, much of it jointly owned with her husband, who is the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. Of Ms. Loeffler's 29 transactions, 27 were sales. One of her two purchases was of a technology company that provides teleworking software. That stock has appreciated in recent weeks, as so many companies have ordered employees to work from home. Early Friday, Ms. Loeffler issued a statement asserting that neither she nor her husband is involved in managing her portfolio. Even as she was shedding shares, Ms. Loeffler was talking down the threat of the coronavirus. "Democrats have dangerously and intentionally misled the American people on Coronavirus readiness," she tweeted on Feb. 28, assuring the public that the president and his team "are doing a great job working to keep Americans healthy safe." As anxiety spread, she talked up the economy. "Concerned about the coronavirus?" she tweeted on March 10. "Remember this: The consumer is strong, the economy is strong jobs are growing, which puts us in the best economic position to tackle COVID19 keep Americans safe." Faced with calls for his resignation from across the political spectrum, Mr. Burr on Friday issued a statement insisting that his stock sales had been based solely on public information and that he had asked the Senate Ethics Committee to "open a complete review of the matter with full transparency." There is pressure for Ms. Loeffler to step down as well, and the recent stock dealings of other senators are now being dissected as well they should be. One might have expected lawmakers to be more circumspect about even the appearance of self dealing after what happened to the Republican Chris Collins, the former congressman from New York, who was sentenced to 26 months in prison earlier this year after pleading guilty to insider trading charges. While at a White House picnic in June 2017, Mr. Collins repeatedly called to alert his son that a small pharmaceutical company in which the family was deeply invested had failed a critical drug trial. Based on the not yet public information, Mr. Collins's son unloaded his holdings in the company, avoiding hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses. "What I've done has marked me for life," Mr. Collins said tearfully at his sentencing hearing in January. Apparently, more needs to be done to protect lawmakers from themselves. Last May, two Democratic senators, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, introduced legislation requiring members to place personal investments in a blind trust, or hold off on making any trades, during their time in office. They would also be prohibited from serving on corporate boards. There may, of course, be perfectly reasonable explanations for what, initially, appears to be illegal and morally reprehensible behavior. Mr. Burr and Ms. Loeffler deserve the opportunity to provide those explanations. The Senate should initiate an ethics investigation of all accusations, and, if warranted, refer relevant findings for criminal prosecution. That said, explicit criminality aside, the real scandal here is the way in which these public servants misled an already anxious and confused public. In times of crisis, the American people need leaders who will rise to the occasion, not sink to their own mercenary interests.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
In a 1988 film of his "Goldberg Variations," shot on a rainy day in East Charleston, Vt., the choreographer Steve Paxton spears a pile of hay with a pitchfork, shovels it into a wheelbarrow and then, as if continuing with his yard work, starts to dance. It's a flailing, stumbling dance twisting and swerving, intercepting itself at odd junctures but also intensely focused, each moment both a necessity and a surprise. Speaking by phone recently from that same Vermont farm, where he has lived since 1972, Mr. Paxton, 75, explained that "Goldberg," a series of improvisations to Bach that he performed from 1986 to 1992, essentially had no structure, no rules. "Except for the most general one," he clarified: to do it differently every time. Through Sunday, Dia Art Foundation honors that improvisatory spirit with "Steve Paxton: Selected Works," four pieces spanning the past 50 years of Mr. Paxton's career. Tailored to the cavernous, sunlit galleries at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y., the program which comprises "Flat" (1964), "Smiling" (1967), "Bound" (1982) and "The Beast" (2010) is the latest in Dia's surveys of pioneering postmodern choreographers including Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. It's Part 2 of what began last year at Dia:Chelsea with the lauded New York premiere of "Night Stand" (2004) by Mr. Paxton and his longtime collaborator Lisa Nelson. Devised with the curator Kelly Kivland, "Selected Works" is not, in Mr. Paxton's eyes, a retrospective. As he wrote in an email: "Most of what I've done isn't reproducible. 'Retrospective' suggests more stability than I allowed my work to have." If there's anything unchanging in that body of work, it may be this attraction to change, to examining what he calls "the unique flow of each moment" (a phrase that, in practice, has none of the triteness it has on paper). An enlightened mischief has animated his career: from his experiments in the 1960s with everyday movement (walking, sitting); to his development in the '70s of Contact Improvisation, the multiperson, weight sharing dance sport that took on a life of its own around the world; to his investigations, beginning in the '80s, of the spine and muscles of the back. "Look at him he's like Nijinsky," the choreographer Cathy Weis said recently at her SoHo loft, revisiting the "Goldberg" footage she had compiled last spring for a Danspace Project gala honoring Mr. Paxton. This was the same gala where Ms. Rainer who, like Mr. Paxton, was a founding member of the iconoclastic Judson Dance Theater and the improvisation collective Grand Union deemed him "my favorite wily choreographer." Judy Hussie Taylor, the executive director of Danspace, called him "the greatest philosopher choreographer of our time." Such pronouncements, while entirely fitting, can also seem at odds with Mr. Paxton's resolutely unassuming nature, a dryness that back in the day, according to the choreographer Nancy Stark Smith, earned him the nickname "Mr. Neutral." "He has a kind of enigmatic quality that I think has attracted people to him over the years," Ms. Stark Smith said, noting his love for "wordplays and mind plays" and for upending conventional notions "of what dance is supposed to be." "In the early days of Contact Improvisation, people didn't even know if it was dance or not," she said. "It looked a little bit like this, a little bit like that. It was like wrestling or jitterbugging or surfing. There was just no way of defining it." Contact Improvisation, which owed much to Mr. Paxton's training in gymnastics and martial arts, is one realm not represented in "Selected Works," though it may be his most widespread innovation. In 1986, after more than a decade of instigating, practicing and teaching the form, he took a step back. "It was keeping me overly busy," he said. "This was one element that I'd found in my dance path, but the path was more important than any individual element. So I tried to get back onto my path." One discovery on that path has been "The Beast," a nearly stationary but wildly alive solo based on Material for the Spine, Mr. Paxton's method, created over the past 18 years, for exploring "the dark side of the body." He is still dancing, if not as vigorously as before. A concussion in his mid 60s left him with a sense that "stillness was my friend," he said. "I never really have regained my interest in throwing my body around in space." Asked whether dancing gets better with age, he replied: "I consider my 50s the best time of all. Dancing was full, options were vast, and I felt my brain had adjusted to the aims I had for movement." "The Beast" is the one work he will perform in Beacon. For the rest, some more indeterminate than others, he has enlisted the performers K. J. Holmes, Polly Motley and Jurij Konjar, a Slovenian dancer who, fascinated by "Goldberg Variations," began performing his own interpretations in 2010. If Mr. Paxton seems to keep a low profile, that might be because he's been out of the country. "The attention to his influence has really been in Europe, not so much here," Ms. Kivland said. "That's one reason why we wanted to present this program." At home and abroad, younger generations of choreographers can't help but romanticize Mr. Paxton and the era he helped to define. He acknowledges that he and his Judson colleagues broke new ground but resists idealizing it. "We didn't mean to rupture anything," he said. "We were just doing what we thought was appropriate work."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Tia Nash, a wedding photographer from New Orleans, was looking forward to a busy spring. She had wedding and engagement photo shoots lined up months in advance, and in mid March managed to photograph three weddings in one weekend. But a few days later, Ms. Nash became ill with what she believed was the coronavirus, and then the governor of Louisiana issued a stay at home order. By the time her fever broke, all of her upcoming assignments had been postponed or canceled. "I was like: The world is collapsing," Ms. Nash said. A passion for capturing the love between recently engaged or married couples was what drew Ms. Nash to the field of wedding photography in the first place, and she was determined to find a way to continue to hold safe photo sessions once she started to feel better. She noticed that other photographers were offering clients the option of socially distanced portrait sessions using the Live Photo feature on FaceTime or by taking screen shots of Zoom calls. So, when a recently engaged couple from New Orleans reached out to inquire about Ms. Nash's wedding packages, she asked if they would be interested in some unconventional engagement photos as well. "It's not the same quality as I'm used to working with," she said, "but there's still super sweet moments and cute memories." The couple had gotten engaged the day before Louisiana's stay at home order went into effect, and Ms. Nash said that after she sent them the photographs they texted her to say that they were both in tears. "I've never met Tia in person, but being on FaceTime with her, it felt like we were having a real engagement photo shoot," Ms. Bienes said. "It made the whole engagement feel real. Before that, we weren't able to celebrate with our family or anything like that, so it was really fun to get to feel special for an hour or so." Ms. Nash posted the photos in the Mastin Labs Community on Facebook, a group for photographers who use Mastin Labs's editing software to share their work. She got so many positive messages that she decided to make a short tutorial about virtual photo shoots, which she sells for 10 on her website. Rose Bowman, an Atlanta based wedding photographer, was one of the more than 140 people who downloaded Ms. Nash's tutorial. Ms. Bowman has been offering FaceTime and Zoom portrait sessions to couples for about two months or so. "There's still a way to create art and capture what's happening in the world right now," she said. "I feel like more people are spending time with each other than they ever have. Why not capture it in a safe way for everybody?" Ms. Bowman typically starts a virtual photo shoot by asking a couple to show her around their space over FaceTime. She picks out the areas with the best lighting for them to pose in, and gives them prompts like she would during an in person photo shoot. The more candid the better. After one couple's dog jumped on the bed with them during her first FaceTime photo session, she started asking couples to bring out their pets for the shoots. When Ms. Bowman did a virtual photo shoot with Brittin and Todd Pittard on April 11, she made sure their dog, Leroy, got to be front and center. The Atlanta based couple had been planning to get married surrounded by family and friends, but were forced to cancel their large celebration because of the coronavirus pandemic. They decided to go ahead with the wedding anyway, and were married over Zoom in their backyard by their high school friend, Bryan Weldon, a Universal Life minister. Leroy was their ring bearer. The couple's wedding planner put them in touch with Ms. Bowman, who took their wedding photos after their two person (and one dog) ceremony. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. "She captured a very special moment in time for us," Mr. Pittard said, "and without technology that would not have happened." Kareem Virgo, a wedding photographer in Palm Beach, Fla., used the Live Photo feature on FaceTime to take candid selfies of his wife, Sandy Virgo, whenever they were apart. As cities and states went into lockdown and his clients began to cancel their photo shoots, Ms. Virgo suggested that he try using FaceTime to take professional, socially distanced portraits of couples. He was sceptical at first, but after getting positive feedback while testing the idea out with a few of his friends, Mr. Virgo started offering free photo sessions to people across the country. He has shot a few engagement photos, but mainly is focused on giving couples a moment to have fun and forget about the daily stress of the pandemic. "We just wanted it to make people feel good," he said. He has taken more than 400 virtual portraits since March and said he may open up more sessions for the rest of the year. Wadly Estel and Faith Thomas, who live in Deerfield Beach, Fla., were one of the first couples Mr. Virgo shot. They had been socially distancing for about a week, and were grateful for the excuse to dress up and go outside. But didn't know what to expect. "The whole shoot was amazing," said Mr. Estel. "We already knew he was a great photographer, but we didn't know what he had in mind." Not only were the couple happy with the photos, but the excuse to have fun and pose with each other was a welcome distraction during an uncertain time. "Being able to do that shoot with him gave my girlfriend and I a date night out," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The Great Lakes Center for the Arts in Bay Harbor, Mich., will open on July 7 with a performance by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The 25 million dollar, 527 seat theater, designed by TowerPinkster, will provide year round entertainment and educational programming. The center was created as part of a 1999 community cultural plan that identified the need for more performance spaces in Northern Michigan, given that the closest arts facility for major performances is 90 minutes away at Interlochen Center for the Performing Arts. "It's a beautiful part of the country and there is a lot of interest in arts but there wasn't a large performing arts center," said Michael M. Kaiser, the founding artistic director and chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management. "What is in the community are local arts groups, but what you also want to bring to a region are the best artists and have the opportunity to experience those and to create educational programming around those."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Driving a flawless Formula One race on Sunday, Daniel Ricciardo became the first Australian to win at the Belgian Spa Francorchamps track since 1960. Sir Jack Brabham was the last to claim that honor. Nico Rosberg, the pole position winner, came in a frustrated second, and Valttieri Bottas, of Williams, was third. Rosberg, whose Mercedes suffered front wing damage on the second lap in a collision with his teammate, Lewis Hamilton, was unable to recoup the time he lost making a pit stop for a new nose section. Hamilton was leading at the time, but one of his tires was punctured in the mishap, and he eventually had to retire from the race. Hamilton collected no points, and Rosberg picked up 18 as well as the criticism of his team's bosses pushing his lead over Hamilton in the championship standings to 220 191. The Mercedes team had qualified much faster than the rest of the field, and victory seemed assured. But Ricciardo, who qualified his Renault powered Red Bull car a seemingly uncompetitive fifth, put together a smooth, error free drive that propelled him to the front and kept him there for most of the race. It was the third victory of his rookie season, and it moved him into third in the points battle with 156 counters. In other racing news from the weekend: Joey Logano capped a big weekend for Penske Racing with a victory Saturday night in the Nascar Sprint Cup event at Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee. It was Logano's third victory of the Sprint Cup season, and it completed a sweep for the Penske squad that included Brad Keselowski's victory the Nascar truck series, and Ryan Blaney's triumph in the Nationwide series race.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Growth Airlines are predicting that 2015 will have the busiest summer travel numbers to date, with an estimated 222 million travelers expected in the skies from June 1 through Aug. 31. (USA Today) Tech Heaven If you're visting Spain anytime soon, a perk is coming your way. Free and unlimited Wi Fi is coming to every airport throughout the country. (Skift) Convenience Hoping to arrive at Cannes in style? The Uberchopper could be your saving grace. (CNN) Precision This nifty map shows what's on the other side of the ocean from any spot in the Western Hemisphere. A lot of surprises: the closest eastward spot from Argentina? Chile! (Mental Floss)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
More Women Than Ever Are Running for President. Do Designers Care? Last November, when the final season of "House of Cards" premiered with Robin Wright a s Claire Underwood in the Oval Office as the first female president, Kemal Harris, the wardrobe designer, revealed that she had made most of the president's outfits herself because she couldn't find what she needed on the runway. Fashion, she said, simply wasn't catering to a woman in charge. It's interesting to think about that in the context of the New York shows, which draw to a close Wednesday . After all, there are more women five! already in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination than ever before (And even more female faces in Congress). Presumably, they will be under some pressure to support local industry, even if the current first lady does not seem to feel the same way. And the looks on the runways will hit stores just as the debate season begins, which means what we have seen this week will be what these women will see when they are mulling over the thorny question of how to dress on stage or in public. So many change agents, all in need of clothes! Did designers give them something to wear? Kind of. When even Vaquera, the outsider brand that's a dab hand at messing with the twin totems of authority and the everyday, suddenly starts playing around with banker striped shirting, you know something is going on. To be fair, it also played with wearable lampshades and mop head shoulders, but still. Issues of confidence and self definition, two crucial components of empowerment, are emerging on the edges and the establishment. Roomy, swishy trouser suits also: They're one of the few trends, besides a major focus on the sleeve. The traditional power suit, however? Not so much. That's O.K. President Underwood might have been pleased at the multitude of sharp edged trench coats at Gabriela Hearst, who built her collection around imagining the life of Maya Plisetskaya, the Russian ballerina who grew up in a gulag and, as the show notes said, "was a woman of style, resourceful in a scarce environment." She might have seen strength in the herringbone trouser suit with red pinstripes. But even more interesting were the nubby sweaters and mid calf skirts, worn under a grand scarf with dangling fringe, the supple leathers and long thin knit Martha Graham dresses, all of which spoke softly of a more internal sense of security but wielded a pretty strong punch. Don't underestimate it. It's worth nothing that, as a designer, Ms. Hearst has long been interested in the thorny issue of fashion and sustainability she uses recycled cashmere and works with local artisans in Uruguay, where she grew up and in her front row were two special guests, Kelsey Juliana and Levi Draheim, who are part of a lawsuit seeking to require the Trump administration to implement climate change legislation. Ms. Hearst's clothes may look restrained but are made by, and for, someone who doesn't shy away from a fight. Just as Maria Cornejo, another longtime proponent of sustainability in fashion, has found fortitude in the ease of a bronze silk doppio sweatshirt over matching pleated pants, a hammered silk drop waisted flapper dress and a deep pile corduroy dress. They don't demand too much but they have backbone. So did the Bermuda shorts at Coach. They were tailored or transparent, worn under all the flyaway floral dresses (prints by the California artist Kaffe Fassett), buffalo plaid coat, fringed leather and shearling, and atop all the truncated cowboy boots. That's more for the youth vote, admittedly. It's a shift in emphasis the idea that security doesn't have to come from structure but instead can be derived from ease taking place even at Oscar de la Renta, one time favorite design house of Hillary Clinton and one of the few brands in New York seemingly still trying to serve a more heritage clientele. See the classic tweeds that appeared, before the designers Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim went on an extended riff inspired by trips to the Middle East and the founder's Spanish roots, melding the influence of the two.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The crossover lifestyle is appealing, even though few owners tow boats or tackle tough trails. Urban couples may find the new Mazda CX 3 to be all the vehicle they need. Daydreaming of conquering the Rubicon Trail? This is not your rig. It's very happy on slippery streets in concrete canyons though. Diminutive crossovers are big business now days. It could be argued that without their plastic cladding and all wheel drive, they're simply hatchbacks. That's okay. Hatchbacks are far more useful than sedans. Fighting for your paycheck in this segment is 500X, Countryman, Encore, HR V, Juke, Renegade, Soul, Trax, and Outlander Sport. CX 3, vaguely reminiscent of the late Toyota Matrix in size and design, is for those who enjoy the act of driving. Mazda is the everyman's BMW. CX 3 isn't Miata sharp of course, it rides higher with a softer suspension. Tuned well for its mission, it's the sport car of the category. Front drive CX 3s begin at 20,840. AWD Grand Touring models retail for 27,120 and includes a snazzy interior trimmed with brushed aluminum and sueded door panels. It's what an owners stares at the most, why not make it attractive? Not that the flowing lines of the exterior lack appeal. Motivation comes from a 2.0 liter 146 horsepower four cylinder with 146 lb ft of torque low in the power band. The only gearbox is a six speed automatic with a manual mode for when you're in the mood. A sport setting remaps the gearbox and throttle response for cut and thrust city maneuvers. Juke beats it off the line but CX 3 has decent power. 0 60 takes a hair over eight seconds. Pushed hard, the engine makes itself heard. Afterwards it's nicely behaved. Based on the economy minded Mazda2 architecture, CX 3 has more of a hefty premium feel to it. Don't expect Audi Q3 or BMW X1 sophistication, but it's quiet and comfortable for the price point. CX 3 and Honda HR V pretty much tie when it comes to fuel economy with all wheel drive models scoring an E.P.A. rating of 27 city, 32 highway). Certainly better than a Suburban, huh? Unique touches on the Grand Touring include a head up display of sorts that rises from the gauge hood. The chairs are sculpted for hard driving skirmishes. 1,900 buys an option package that includes radar assisted cruise control and automatic braking. That's stuff that was only found on luxury cars just a few years ago. Gripes? The folding armrest makes access to the interface knob (and more importantly my coffee) awkward, even with it up out of the way. The start button is quite close to the wiper stalk. There's marginal room for an average sized adult in back but they may find the seatbacks a skosh upright. Use all three belts if you're aiming to sever relations with those people. Otherwise stop at two. With all seats used, usable cargo room is about half the size of the segment's champ HR V. The Mazda wins when driving though. CX 3 is not the roomiest in class but it has a lot to offer those who know they won't be towing or off roading. Stylish, athletic and efficient, it leads the pack in smiles per gallon.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Kate Braverman, Who Wrote of Women on the Margins, Dies at 70 Kate Braverman, a brash and theatrically dramatic writer whose novels, short stories and poetry were dense with lush and spellbinding imagery, died on Oct. 12 at her home in Santa Fe, N.M. She was 70. Her daughter, Gabrielle Goldstein , said the cause was cardiac arrest. Outspoken and outrageous, Ms. Braverman brought a ferocious energy to books like "Lithium for Medea" (1979), with their focus on women on society's margins. "Ms. Braverman possesses a magical, incantatory voice and the ability to loft ordinary lives into the heightened world of myth," Michiko Kakutani wrote in her New York Times review of "Palm Latitudes" (1988), a novel about three women in a Los Angeles barrio, including La Puta de la Luna, the most famous prostitute in the neighborhood. "The night will be as all others, treacherous, studded with disguised traps and graves," Ms. Braverman wrote of La Puta. "She will survive it. There will be gold and the danger of barter with strangers, foreigners with metallic mouths of invisible eaten coins and greed, with mouths that are miniature replicas of the city, voids, empty, less than mud or clay, which are fundamental." Ms. Braverman who struggled with addictions to cocaine in the 1970s and '80s and to heroin in the 1990s found purpose in writing. It was more than a mission; it was a mystical conjuring that brought her characters to vivid life. Stories, she said, revealed themselves to her on the page in an almost cinematic fashion. In "Palm Latitudes" (1988), Ms. Braverman wrote about three women in the Los Angeles barrio, one of whom was the most famous prostitute in the neighborhood. "It's not a flat surface but three dimensional, with an audio track, scents, seasons, an entire substrata of sound and cadence," she told Bella Online, a women's publication, in 2018, in explaining her attraction to writing. "The page is a unique kingdom, vast, mysterious and eccentrically indigenous. It's like a dance, you do some and it does some. To have the page open itself, to shed its skin and allow you to autopsy the living and the dead, is an inexplicable experience." She harbored no doubts that her fiction had elevated her into an exalted place in literature beside men like Saul Bellow, Joseph Conrad, Philip Roth, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. "I should not be compared to other women," she said in 2006 in an interview on "San Francisco/unscripted," a local television show. "I do not write or live like a woman. I'm a complete outlaw in my sensibility and in my demand that women be given total access to the page, which they are not." But, she conceded, "Sylvia Plath, 50 years later, is still not really in the canon because she dared to complain about the 'smog of cooking, the smog of hell.'" Kate Ellen Braverman was born on Feb. 5, 1949, in Philadelphia. Her mother, Millicent ( Glubt ) Braverman, co owned a public relations agency, and her father, Irving, was a contractor. The family moved to Los Angeles when Kate was a child. Kate envisioned herself as a writer from a young age and joined a writing workshop at U.C.L.A. when she was 15. When she was 16 she left home for Berkeley, where she attended high school. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor's degree in anthropology. (She earned a master's in English from Sonoma State University in the 1980s.) In 1971 she moved back to Los Angeles, where she was a founder of the Venice Poetry Workshop. Returning to her adopted hometown reignited feelings of alienation, loneliness and loathing for the city that she described, in a 2006 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle, as a "gulag with palm trees." She felt like a permanent outsider in Los Angeles, which she said lacked an intellectual community that recognized or appreciated her. She told The Chronicle, "I was continually having to translate myself into a local dialect that I barely spoke." Ms. Braverman's "The Incantation of Frida K." (2001) is an imagined memoir of the painter Frida Kahlo, looking back at her life on her sickbed. Yet she stayed there, writing more stories, poems and novels, including "Wonders of the West" (1993) and "The Incantation of Frida K." (2001), an imagined memoir of the painter Frida Kahlo, looking back at her life on her sickbed. Reviewing the Kahlo book for NPR, the novelist Alan Cheuse said, "As with Kahlo herself, women are Braverman's great subject, but she also riffs in remarkably beautiful passages on the nature of cities and on the effects of drugs." She became a writing teacher at the U.C.L.A. Extension Writers' Program and, in the 1990s, held workshops at her home. Her students included Janet Fitch, the author of the novel "White Oleander" (1999), and Samantha Dunn, the author of the novel "Failing Paris" (1999). In phone interviews, both women described a high octane and uncompromising teacher who inspired them to add propulsive power to their work. But they also said she could be tough on the students; some of them, Ms. Fitch said, wept in their cars outside Ms. Braverman's house after being criticized. "She lived and died by the word," Ms. Dunn said. "If you were writing anything less than incendiary prose, you weren't living up to the challenge of the word." Ms. Fitch recalled: "Her voice is constantly in my head. When something was particularly well phrased, she'd go, 'Yum, yum,' and when I write, I sometimes say, 'Yum, yum.'" Nearly 20 years after her last class, Ms. Dunn received a letter from Ms. Braverman that reminded her of her unyielding approach to literature. "You thought writing a reasonable profession," Ms. Braverman wrote. "You thought you could wear linen and gloves . You didn't realize the habitual hazards of this art form, the contagious derangement, the exposure and subsequent addiction to toxins, the delirium of thirty hours in stark communion with a self that is insatiable for discovery."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Q. I thought my saved list of web articles was supposed to stay in sync between my new Windows 10 PC and my Surface tablet, but it's not. What am I doing wrong? A. The Reading List feature in the Microsoft Edge browser can store all the pages you have marked for later perusal, but you need to be signed into your Microsoft account on all your devices in order for the list to stay updated. The synchronization happens online, so if you are not signed into your account or you do not have an internet connection at the time the Reading List does not update on any Windows 10 tablets, phones or other computers you use. You should also make sure the Edge browser is set to sync your saved articles. To do so, tap the three dot menu icon in the top right corner of the browser window and select Settings. In the Settings menu, scroll down to Account and confirm that the "Sync your favorites and reading list" button is set to On.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Credit...M. Scott Brauer for The New York Times BOSTON Hoppy, a young red panda, was the first patient of the day, carried and anesthetized into the exam room so he could get a physical. Then Mildred, a 24 year old barnacle goose, wobbled painfully across the floor as veterinarians analyzed her gait. They couldn't see any improvement 10 days after an earlier exam. Replacement of the degenerating joints isn't an option for a goose. Maybe acupuncture could help? Next up was Sofina, an 8 year old diabetic lemur that had done well on insulin shots for six years , but displayed troubling new symptoms. She kept her right hand clenched, though she could use it when necessary reminiscent of a human diabetes patient coping with neuropathy. This was a typical morning for three veterinarians at the Franklin Park Zoo. But it was a fairly unusual one for the Harvard Medical School student alongside them. Outbreaks of infectious diseases like Ebola and Lyme disease are stark reminders of how vulnerable people are to a dysfunctional ecosystem, said Dr. Eric Baitchman, vice president of animal health and conservation at Zoo New England, which operates the Franklin Park Zoo in central Boston, and the smaller Stone Zoo in nearby Stoneham, Mass. "Most medical students don't get that side of the picture," Dr. Baitchman said, noting that it is often human logging, bushmeat consumption and other man made habitat changes that trigger such crises. "Human activities can have direct influences on our own health," he said. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Dr. Sharon Deem, director of the Institute for Conservation Medicine at the St Louis Zoo, said zoos and medical specialists have worked together for decades, but there have only been modest collaborations between zoos and medical schools. What Harvard Medical School and Zoo New England are doing is more formal and longstanding than any other program she's aware of. "Eric and his team are at the forefront of what is hopefully going to be a common thing, but it's not right now," she said, speaking of Dr. Baitchman. "I feel like the wick is lit now and it's got enough momentum that it will light the candle at the end." People also have a profound need for animals and nature, Dr. Deem said, citing things like therapy dogs and the restorative power of a walk in the woods. "These have positive physical and psychological impacts that we shouldn't overlook," she said. Several students who completed the rotation said they were surprised by how much they learned during a month at the zoo. One tested a gorilla for heart disease, another treated a bat who had broken a wing in a fight, and another spent part of his first day struggling to keep an African tortoise from ambling out of an X ray machine while he tried to check it for bladder stones. "Seeing him being shy helped me come out of my shell," said Dr. Gilad Evrony, the first Harvard medical student to do a rotation. Dr. Evrony, now a pediatrics resident at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, wrote about his zoo experience in 2016 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "I would never have predicted that I would spend my final month of medical school performing fetal ultrasounds on a pregnant gorilla, phlebotomizing a 500 pound tapir with hemochromatosis, caring for a meerkat in heart failure, and investigating medical mysteries across the animal kingdom," he wrote in the article. He also observed: "For nearly every disease I saw at the zoo, the simple question of why certain species, human or nonhuman, are susceptible to it, while others are not, raised immediate possibilities for research. Nearly every day at the zoo, the veterinarians and I would make fascinating, unexpected connections between human and veterinary medicine." In an interview, he said the stint at the zoo inspired new respect for the complexity of veterinary medicine. "I really had to overcome some bias that I think pervades much of medicine, that human physiology and disease is unique and that veterinary medicine does not have much to teach us," Dr. Evrony said. He and other students in the elective said they were repeatedly struck by how much they learned from treating species other than their own. Dr. Travis Zack, now a resident in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said he gained new insights into a rare form of human chronic lymphocytic leukemia by treating the zoo's 13 year old black swan, Merlot, for the same disease. The swan appeared to be responding well to a human leukemia drug. "We think of these as human diseases, but they're really diseases that occur across the animal kingdom," said Dr. Zack, who also has a doctorate in biophysics, and works at the Broad Institute, a genetics research institute affiliated with Harvard and MIT. Dr. Elisa Walsh, another student who did the rotation, said she was impressed by the range of evolutionary changes among animal life, solving problems in different ways. "It's just incredible how much diversity there is," she said. She collaborated on a project with a nearby hospital that is using ultrasounds to test gorillas for heart disease aimed at learning more about the disease in humans and other great apes. She also learned about tricky diagnoses, and how to to improvise, she said. Among other animals, Dr. Walsh treated an aging Macaw named Henry that suddenly couldn't fly. Rolling him into an MRI machine to figure out what was wrong was an "interesting experience," she said. After diagnosing him with a small stroke, she and the veterinarians devised a physical therapy regimen to help him recover his ability to fly. "Thankfully it had a good ending," she said. One morning at the Franklin Park Zoo, Wataru Ebina had a few ideas for tests that might help identify what was going on with Sofina the lemur. The veterinarians suspected that the animal's newfound resistance to insulin might have been caused by Cushing's disease, an endocrine problem triggered by too much of the stress hormone cortisol. But testing cortisol levels requires several exams over time, which is tricky for an animal that won't pee in a cup or stay still for a blood draw. Medical tests cause animals tremendous anxiety, which drives up their cortisol levels. And taking them out of their social environment for repeated testing can upset the social dynamics and hierarchy of all five of the lemurs that share a habitat. As a technician took Hoppy's temperature, the medical team checked his eyes: his pupils were constricted but looked healthy; his ears, no problems; his abdomen: "No obvious masses. Not distended." They moved each of his limp limbs to ensure he had a full range of motion, and squeezed his furry paws to poke out and inspect each extended claw. "It's all the same anatomy," Dr. Ebina said, a few minutes later with the exam successfully completed, and Hoppy's X rays displayed on a nearby computer. "Seeing an animal that looks completely different but is actually similar reinforces the anatomical concepts that we learn, which is very helpful for my education going forward." Later, driving the red panda back to his exhibit space at the front of the zoo, Dr. Alex Becket, an associate veterinarian, reported that Hoppy seemed to be recovering well from the anesthesia. He hadn't vomited, appeared aware of his surroundings, and had begun grooming himself to get back to normal. Although the elective program is supposed to teach species interdependence, Hoppy hadn't quite gotten the message. "He's trying to get the stink of human off of him," Dr. Becket said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
PLATONIC Stream on YouTube. This 10 episode series, created by Erin C. Buckley, revisits a pre pandemic New York, before dating became even more complicated. In short five to six minute vignettes, Olive (Summer Spiro), a gay Brooklynite, and her straight friend, Billy (Ryan King), waft in and out of relationships in their search for connection and intimacy. They navigate the sexual fluidity and boundaries of modern companionship, including open relationships, bisexuality and flirtatious friends (who may be more than friends). Shot in close quarters in bars and small apartments, the series feels like a bite size version of "Girls" or "High Maintenance." REPRESENT (2020) Watch through virtual cinemas. The three female candidates at the center of this documentary are not only out to win; they're also pushing to shake up their local political systems. There's Myya Jones, a 22 year old mayoral candidate in Detroit who wants to empower her Black constituents. Julie Cho, a state representative candidate in Illinois, aims to establish herself in the Republican Party, while also trying to win over voters in her liberal district. And Bryn Bird, a Democrat, wants to disrupt the conservative, male dominated political network in her rural Ohio town as township trustee. In her review for The Times, Lovia Gyarkye wrote that "it becomes increasingly clear that running for office as a woman isn't just about engaging inactive voters."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Green! Red! White! On Thursday night after the Lincoln Center Festival's international production of George Balanchine's "Jewels," it was exhilarating to behold the dancers of "Emeralds" (Paris Opera Ballet), "Rubies" (New York City Ballet) and "Diamonds" (Bolshoi Ballet from Moscow) assemble in three bright stripes, on the stage of the David H. Koch Theater where, 50 years ago (it was then the New York State Theater), "Jewels" had its premiere. The separate jewel colors met to make the stage like some tricolor flag. More relevant to Balanchine (1904 83), these companies represent the three countries most vital to his long career. He learned to dance and to make ballets in Russia, where he lived until 1924; he reached an early maturity in France, in particular working under the aegis of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; and New York is where he, with Lincoln Kirstein, founded the School of American Ballet, in 1933, and City Ballet, in 1948. "Emeralds," to Faure music, has long been seen as French. "Rubies," to Stravinsky, is quintessentially New York its speed, density and jazzy modernity characterize this city rather than this nation. And "Diamonds," to Tchaikovsky, suggests, first, Russia's vast rural landscapes and, finally, its grand imperial cities. As a rule, it's better to watch a single troupe demonstrate the diversity required to dance all three, and companies now do so from St. Petersburg in Russia to Seattle. But big anniversaries deserve big treats. Debates on these troupes' individual merits in "Jewels" will continue until Sunday: the Bolshoi and City Ballet are taking turns dancing "Rubies" and "Diamonds," while the Parisians and the Bolshoi offer changes of casts. On Thursday, the illustrious performance by the Bolshoi's Olga Smirnova in the "Diamonds" prima ballerina role was just what festivals should be about, while City Ballet's three lead dancers for "Rubies" Megan Fairchild, Joaquin de Luz, Teresa Reichlen exemplified what the home team can do best. You can see how the Bolshoi and City Ballet styles are related: long phrases, luxurious texture, expansive physicality, calmly off balance emphasis. The Paris style, marvelously chic, proves far less right for Balanchine, above all in the women's clipped phrasing and anti musical dynamics (dwelling archly on transitions, flicking lightly through important linear points). "Emeralds," although Gallic, does not suggest Paris anyway: It seems to belong in some Fontainebleau like forest glade, whereas these dancers emanate big city polish. Ms. Smirnova, still young, first danced the "Diamonds" role in 2012, near the start of her career. The refined arc of her raised arms; the elegance with which she holds and turns her head; the plucked, lucid emphasis of her arched feet are all riveting. She marvelously leads the role from chivalrous Romantic mystery to brightly classical celebration. Her partner, Semyon Chudin, has gained immensely in assurance since New York's last Bolshoi season three years ago. In "Rubies," Ms. Reichlen's gleaming, sly, huge scaled performance of the soloist role has long seemed definitive, while Mr. de Luz's charmingly assertive style is effective. The surprise was Ms. Fairchild. As in other recent performances, she has suddenly bloomed into a marvelously free personality: adult, decisive, engagingly robust, merrily witty. Nobody worked harder than Balanchine to establish plotless pure dance choreography as theatrically engrossing. He was also, in several works, ballet's greatest dramatist there is no contradiction here, for drama pervades his non narrative work. "Jewels," often described as the first full length abstract ballet, yields more rewards if you see it as containing multiple stories, situations and worlds. Its three parts, though dissimilar, are connected. In each, dancers repeatedly move from a bent forward position with arms together pointing like a unicorn's horn to an expansively arched back open gesture. Each has a pas de deux in which the ballerina seems like a magical wild beast whom her partner keeps at arm's length. The European companies, though they keep the basic color schemes and jeweled emphasis, have brought their own costumes by Christian Lacroix ("Emeralds") and Elena Zaitseva ("Diamonds"). Since City Ballet maintains the original costumes by Karinska, locals are likely to object to these alternative versions. (The blue cyan Lacroix couture feels especially wrong.) Yet the visitors may look with similar distaste at City Ballet's three decors (made by Peter Harvey in 2004, coarser in emphasis than his 1967 originals, which now look marvelous with the Mariinsky of St. Petersburg). I suspect close scrutiny will show that the Paris Opera and Bolshoi perform "Emeralds" and "Diamonds" in texts slightly different from those currently used by City Ballet. "Jewels" has long been a perfect introduction to ballet's poetry; but only this century has it taken off in international repertory. At the climax of Thursday's bows, the three companies were joined onstage by their artistic directors: Aurelie Dupont (Paris Opera), Peter Martins (City Ballet), and Makhar Vaziev (Bolshoi) an entente cordiale before our eyes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Caris LeVert and Kevin Durant were already close friends when they became Nets teammates over the summer. Their relationship dates to 2016, when LeVert had his third foot operation in less than two years just as he was leaving Michigan for the N.B.A. draft. Durant and LeVert had sustained similar injuries a Jones fracture and had each turned to Martin O'Malley, the Nets' team doctor. They were both clients of the agency Roc Nation, and Durant reached out to LeVert to offer words of encouragement. It was a special moment. In high school, LeVert was known by the nickname "Baby Durant." "He's like a big brother to me," LeVert said of Durant, who is not expected to play this season as he recovers from a ruptured Achilles' tendon. "He's given me some pretty good advice over the years. At the same time, he lets me be my own man. He's a great teammate. He always tells me to seize every moment." The 25 year old combo guard, who has been coming off the bench as part of his slow reintegration into the lineup, scored 16 of his 20 points in the second half and ended the night with 6 rebounds and 3 assists. Down the stretch, he converted on a putback and a 3 point attempt, and it appeared the Nets were going to secure their first victory since Dec. 21. Yet Brooklyn faltered once again, its 7 point, fourth quarter lead vanishing after several empty possessions in crunchtime, including a pair of missed shots by LeVert. The Thunder rallied behind the veteran point guard Chris Paul, and the game headed to overtime. LeVert headed to the bench, having played only 22 minutes the maximum of his team imposed time limit. The Nets mustered just 2 points in the extra session and fell to the Thunder, 111 103, pushing their losing streak to seven games. LeVert could only watch from the sidelines. "That's how we operate," Nets Coach Kenny Atkinson said. "Thinking about his long term health and our long term plan, and sticking with that plan. It's easy to say, 'Hey, let's go win this game.' I think you'd regret it if something ever happened." Said LeVert: "I'm a competitor. I want to play. But I trust the coaches and the staff. There's always another game." The Nets, at 16 20, have a little more than half of their season left, and perhaps more if they can stay in position for a playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. They are in eighth place with 46 games to go and no clear return date for their best player, Kyrie Irving, who has been out since November with an injured shoulder. The teams just below the Nets in the standings the Charlotte Hornets and the Detroit Pistons also have problems to sort out. "There's no pressure at all," LeVert said. "I just have a lot of fun playing the game. It always sucks to go out with an injury, but being back just gives me so much joy. I feel like I'm right where I used to be it's just about knocking some of the rust off." LeVert's significant injury history led to his falling to the Nets as the 20th overall selection in the 2016 draft, three months after he had a foot operation. Injuries have plagued him ever since. He dislocated his right foot in November 2018 in what at first looked like a gruesome end to his season, but he returned three months later. Over the last two seasons, LeVert has missed a combined 67 games. When healthy, though, LeVert is a difference maker, because he can create his own shot, defend on the perimeter and facilitate an offense especially with the often anemic second unit. He had a breakthrough performance in the first round of the playoffs last season against the Philadelphia 76ers, averaging 21 points on 49.3 percent shooting. LeVert, who has signed a three year, 52.5 million extension with the Nets that begins next season, was averaging 16.8 points, 5 rebounds and 4 assists per game this season before getting hurt again. LeVert said his thumb had actually been bothering him since he "banged it in training camp" before the start of last season. He played through the pain before disaster struck on Nov. 10 in Phoenix, where he jammed the thumb on a back cut. His scoring capabilities were sorely missed during his 24 game absence between November and this month. The Nets went 12 12 but ranked just 26th in offensive efficiency over that span, averaging only 104.9 points per 100 possessions. By contrast, the top 10 teams all averaged at least 110.0 points per 100 possessions. The Nets' offensive struggles also stemmed from the absence of Irving, who hasn't played since Nov. 14. Irving received a cortisone shot for his injured shoulder on Dec. 24 and might need a potentially season ending operation, depending on how his shoulder responds to the treatment. The Nets faced heavy criticism during their recent skid for not being transparent about Irving's injury status. Irving's spot in the starting lineup has gone to Spencer Dinwiddie, who has averaged 24.8 points and 6.9 assists in his stead. But Dinwiddie has struggled with his shot of late, and his supporting cast has been largely ineffective. Since Irving went down, the Nets have shot a league worst 31.5 percent from 3 point territory. "Our offense is not where it needs to be," Atkinson said on Tuesday. "And it's my job to find a solution. LeVert remains confident that the beleaguered, depleted Nets can right their ship. "I believe in every single guy in this locker room, and I feel like we can turn it around," LeVert said. "We've been in the last couple games. I think it's just about believing. The mind set has been 'Let's not lose this game' as opposed to 'Let's win this game.' That's a huge thing to me. Once we get over that hump, we'll be fine."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
In the BC era (Before Covid 19), theater lovers tended to eye screens warily. Now, we browse the Broadway HD catalog, scout YouTube for obscure European webcasts and text each other the link to Lin Manuel Miranda's 14 minute musical "21 Chump Street." There is a lot of streaming theater these days, even if it's not always easy to find the selection below is but a sample of what's available. Note that while some shows stay online for several days or even weeks, others are appointment events, so mark your calendars. The playwright C.A. Johnson made an auspicious MCC Theater debut in February with "All The Natalie Portmans" and returns with a reading of "When," part of the company's Live Labs series of one act plays. In the earlier show, a teenage girl was obsessed with the titular star; screen representations also figure in "When," about a mother daughter duo played by Kecia Lewis and Antoinette Crowe Legacy. The webcast is available on the theater's YouTube site through June 27. Johnson is also participating in the third edition of the "Homebound Project" (through June 28), which pairs actors and playwrights in a dozen short works. She's been matched with the Tony Award winner Daveed Diggs. Just as intriguing: Michael R. Jackson and Diane Lane, Bess Wohl and Ashley Park, Korde Arrington Tuttle and Blair Underwood. The effort raises money for the organization No Kid Hungry. For viewers feeling a little Shakespeare'd out, here are a couple of opportunities to engage with the great 17th century playwright Moliere. The upstart Moliere in the Park (which in normal times would take place in Brooklyn's Prospect Park) is streaming a reading of his "Tartuffe," starring Raul Esparza as the titular pseudo devout hypocrite and, in a neat casting twist, Samira Wiley as Orgon, the husband of the woman Tartuffe covets. Show times are June 27 at 2 and 7 p.m.; the stream will remain on Moliere in the Park's YouTube channel through July 1 at 2 p.m. RSVP is required for a link to the livestream which will offer closed captions in English and French. On July 2, Joshua William Gelb and Dave McGee are presenting "Hypochondriac 1," the first portion of an adaptation of the Moliere comedy "The Imaginary Invalid," starring Jessie Shelton. It's part of Gelb's "Theater in Quarantine" series, watchable on YouTube, which has developed into an intriguing laboratory exploring the online possibilities of movement and storytelling. (Gelb has turned a closet into a stage.) On May 22, 10 playwrights, including Annalisa Dias, Psalmayene 24 and Karen Zacarias, set out to interview 10 residents of Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland, on behalf of Arena Stage. The resulting monologues were then performed by local actors and edited into the program "May 22, 2020." The 55 minute hybrid of theater and filmed documentary is watchable on YouTube. Imelda Marcos had a bit of a theatrical moment in the mid 2010s, when two bio shows about the former first lady of the Philippines popped up. While the David Byrne and Fatboy Slim musical, "Here Lies Love," discofied the story, Carlos Celdran took a more intimate approach in his one man show "Livin' La Vida Imelda," which The Times described as a "gleefully gossipy study guide." Now the Ma Yi Theater Company has made a recording available until June 30, or until the show reaches 6,986 views, whichever comes first. Welcome to the brave new world of streaming agreements. Lincoln Center Theater has been slow to get into the streaming game but it seems to be finding its sea legs. Right in time to close Pride Month, it is presenting the Broadway revival of William Finn's "Falsettos" free on Broadway HD until June 27 at 8 p.m. (James Lapine's 2014 adaptation of the Moss Hart memoir "Act One," starring Tony Shalhoub, Andrea Martin and Santino Fontana, streams on LCT's YouTube channel through July 3.) We are also getting a chance to revisit "The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me," David Drake's popular solo show, from 1992, with a one night only broadcast of a 2013 Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS event this time to benefit the Provincetown Theater. Drake himself was on board to help recreate his slices of gay life, with assists from a starry cast including Robin De Jesus, Andre De Shields, Anthony Rapp, Wesley Taylor and BD Wong, under Robert La Fosse's direction. The virtual curtain rises June 28 at 7 p.m. If an institution was ready to address confined audiences, it was Britain's National Theater, with its catalog of high quality live captures. Since April, the company has unrolled a new, well, new old show every week. Up until July 2 we can watch Nicholas Hytner's take on "A Midsummer Night's Dream," a Bridge Theater production with Gwendoline Christie. It will be succeeded by a rare presentation of Lorraine Hansberry's "Les Blancs" in a staging by Yael Farber ("Mies Julie"). Each show is available for seven days. Elsewhere in Britain, the Bush Theater commissioned six black British artists to respond to the killing of George Floyd. The short pieces were gathered under the umbrella "The Protest" and are available on the company's YouTube channel. (The Bush's "Monday Monologues" series is worth checking out as well.) Finally, you rarely see a company pushing "a bootleg capture" on its site but hey, these are uncommon times. The Bristol Old Vic is making available its musical adaptation of a Victor Hugo novel no, not "Les Miserables" or "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," but "The Grinning Man" starting June 26 for a week. Watch for puppet action that was described as "miraculous" when the show played the West End. The musical "Xcalibur" started life as "Artus Excalibur" and was renamed for its Seoul premiere last year, led by the local star Kai as King Arthur. That is the version the fledgling platform Broadway on Demand will start streaming June 27 at 8 p.m. as part of its new Global Spotlight Series. While the show's creators, which include the composer Frank Wildhorn ("Jekyll Hyde"), are American, the production appears to have a glossy K pop sheen. The premiere stream and an on demand rental are available for 5.99 until July 6.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
An Afternoon With Cardi B as She Makes Money Moves Belcalis Almanzar, known as Cardi B to her growing number of fans, stepped into the W hotel in Midtown Manhattan wearing leggings, an Atlanta Braves "Los Bravos" logo jersey and white Yeezy sneakers. She breezed past a bellhop, who was rapping her hit song, "Bodak Yellow (Money Moves)." This "regular degular schmegular girl from the Bronx," formerly a stripper, built her career on her ability to rattle off one liners like "I'mma get that schmoney" on the VH1 reality series "Love Hip Hop." During her time on the show, some viewers saw her as a hero of female empowerment, as she made pronouncements like "Ever since I started using guys, I feel so much better about myself. I feel so damn powerful." Saturday was a big day for the 24 year old hip hop star. She had come to the hotel from a sound check at MoMA PS1, in Queens, where she would take the stage that evening. After releasing two mixtapes, Cardi B signed a deal with Atlantic Records earlier this year. "Bodak Yellow," which is No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100, has been the rap anthem of the summer, and tonight she would be performing it for the first time at an event open to the public in her hometown. In the elevator she asked her publicist Patientce Foster, "What are we going to do to celebrate if I'm No. 1?" "Are you going to get a butler named Carlton?" Ms. Foster asked, laughing. She said she got her first pair for her 19th birthday from an admirer at a strip club where she worked. At the time she was amazed at the 800 price tag. The most she had paid for shoes was the 300 she had spent on a pair of Jeffrey Campbells. Cardi B announced that she was going to take a nap, slipped off her Yeezys and made her way to the bedroom. Lately she had been going nonstop. She had just come from recording new tracks in Atlanta, the home city of Offset (of the rap group Migos), whom she described as "this boy I'm dating." Before that she was in Toronto, where Drake conferred his blessing by bringing her on stage at the OVO Fest. Not a half hour of nap time had passed before Ms. Foster called from the living room: "Bells? I need to start taking out your hair!" Showtime was 6:45 p.m., and Cardi B needed to have her hair and makeup done. She took a seat in the living room. Shawnta Loran, who was the makeup artist for Cardi B (back when her stage name was Camilla) and other dancers at Sue's, a strip club in Mount Vernon, N.Y., added some powder to her face with a brush. "She knew me when I was a roach," Cardi B said of Ms. Loran. The rapper's use of "roach" made news recently: Some Twitter users had dug up an old Cardi B tweet in which the word appeared, and accused her of using it as a slur against black women with darker skin. Cardi B defended herself, saying it was a common term in the Bronx, with no racist connotations. She took out her phone and called her father to discuss a car she was about to buy: an orange Bentley Bentayga S.U.V. with "peanut butter" interior, as she described it. "To drive around Manhattan?" asked another member of her entourage, Marsha St. Hubert, a senior vice president of urban marketing at Atlantic Records. "To drive around Manhattan?" "I don't know how to drive," Cardi B admitted. At 6 p.m. her stylist, Kollin Carter, along with his assistant, helped her into a custom LaQuan Smith lace red dress. When she slipped on the Louboutins, she was ready to go. She rode in the back of a black S.U.V. toward MoMA PS1 with Ashley Kalmanowitz, senior director of publicity at Atlantic Records, Ms. Foster; her 4 year old son, Brave; and Ms. Foster's mother, Pamela Foster. Cardi B entered through the back and immediately found herself in a narrow hallway crowded with people trying to catch a glimpse of her. She had a hard time making her way through the crush of fans. She could hear the crowd of more than 4,000 people chanting, "Cardi B! Cardi B! Cardi B!" She tucked her hair behind her ears and stepped toward the stage.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
INDIAN WELLS, Calif. The BNP Paribas Open in Southern California attracts nearly a half million fans each year. It is one of the top five events on the international tennis calendar. So when organizers of the event known as "Indian Wells" decided on Sunday to cancel the two week tournament that had been scheduled to start Wednesday, a new reality descended across the world of sports and entertainment: Every event in the coming weeks, no matter how big, could be in jeopardy. "If Indian Wells cancels, that is a real sign we're in a serious situation," said Donald Dell, the longtime sports promoter and agent. Indian Wells joined a growing list of events in sports, entertainment and commerce that have been canceled over fears of coronavirus, which has been blamed for nearly 4,000 deaths worldwide and infected more than 100,000 people since its outbreak in Asia in late December. South by Southwest, the music festival and corporate conference in Austin, Texas; Alpine skiing's season ending World Cup races in Italy; and even the TED2020 conference scheduled for Vancouver, British Columbia, in April, all have been canceled in recent days. Medical experts remain divided over the benefit of canceling mass events in locations that are not hot spots for the virus, or whether the people who might have attended these events are any safer simply going through their everyday lives, especially those who live in major metropolitan areas. Yet there was little doubt Monday that the cancellation of Indian Wells, a tournament owned by the billionaire Larry Ellison, was a major development. "I think they did everything they could, but all of a sudden the situation changed overnight, which is unfortunate," Kristie Ahn, a member of the Women's Tennis Association's player council, said of tournament officials for Indian Wells. Ahn had received a wild card to play at Indian Wells. "We can't be mad at them for what, I think, is ultimately the right decision." The N.B.A. scheduled a conference call with team health care officials for Monday night to discuss a series of new precautions, including limiting the number of people who interact directly with players each day. A confidential memo recently circulated to the league's teams did not mention canceling games, but last week N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver told teams to prepare for playing games without fans in its arenas. Russ Granik, the former deputy commissioner of the N.B.A., said the league had confronted a similar period of concern about the safety of attending games after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In that case, however, the N.B.A. had nearly two months to prepare for the start of its season, and the response was fairly obvious work with the government and law enforcement experts to make arenas more secure by screening the people as they entered. Making arenas a place where fans can feel safe from a complex, invisible virus is thornier. "This is spreading and nobody knows exactly how and to what effect," Granik said. "This is a much grayer problem at the moment." For the organizers of any major upcoming match, or tournament or race, using the term "fluid situation" has the become the most common way to describe whether an event will take place. The sports and entertainment calendar in the coming weeks includes the annual N.C.A.A. men's and women's basketball tournaments; the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif.; the Masters golf championship; and the Boston Marathon. As New York entered its second day in a state of emergency, leaders of the New York Road Runners were discussing with city officials whether to go forward with the New York City Half Marathon scheduled for this weekend. The race, which runs along the city's streets from Prospect Park in Brooklyn to Central Park in Manhattan, has 25,000 participants and is among the largest events the organization stages. "We are going to make our best judgment very shortly on that," Mayor Bill de Blasio said. "At this point, I don't see a reason to cancel. That can change at any point." After canceling their tennis tournament, organizers in Indian Wells moved swiftly to accommodate players, many of whom including Venus Williams, Rafael Nadal and Dominic Thiem, last year's men's singles champion had already arrived in California. Players originally in the main draw in singles and doubles and in the qualifying event in singles were guaranteed complimentary hotel rooms, access to practice courts and medical and laundry service through March 16. Ahn said she practiced Monday afternoon with the Taiwanese player Hsieh Su wei before attending a WTA council meeting aimed at sorting out the effect of the tournament's cancellation on matters like players' ranking points and prize money distribution. She said she couldn't help but be struck by such an uncharacteristic vibe at a tournament "all the players really look forward to." "It's quiet," Ahn said. "And the morale was pretty low. A lot of people are shocked. Some were angry." Jean Christophe Faurel, a coach for the tennis star Coco Gauff, described the mood of the players and coaches as "shocked." "Coco opened the door of the car and said, 'I have some bad news,'" Faurel said in a telephone interview. Gauff's team went to dinner, and no one spoke for a while, Faurel said. Then they began wondering about the biggest question. "What happens to the upcoming tournaments?" Faurel said. "When you see this canceled, you start to think that everything is going to be canceled for the next couple of months. There are cases of coronavirus everywhere." The Miami Open, another big tennis tournament, is scheduled to begin at the end of March. After that, the spring schedule reads like a tour of some of the European hot spots for the coronavirus: clay court tournaments in Madrid and Rome, then the French Open at Roland Garros in Paris. In a statement, a spokesman for the Miami Open said Monday the tournament was moving forward as scheduled. The ATP also recommended that its players remain in the United States if they intended to play in the Miami Open in order to avoid any quarantines brought about by leaving and then re entering the country. If the Miami Open is played, it is expected to enact restrictions similar to those Indian Wells initially had announced, such as barring ball kids from touching player towels and limiting contact between players and fans. It might be possible to stage the event without spectators: an option Indian Wells and Ellison rejected but one that IMG, the owners of the Miami Open, could accept. "Safety remains a top priority," the Miami Open spokesman said. "We are working with the ATP and WTA tours on recommended best practices and following C.D.C. guidelines closely to provide a safe environment for fans, players and staff." Numerous players remained at Indian Wells on Monday searching for answers. Mitchell Krueger, ranked 194th in the world, played in a smaller event at the site last week, and earned a spot in the main draw at Indian Wells. "To go from the high of getting a wild card into a Masters series event which doesn't happen every day for someone with my ranking to not playing just like that is tough," Krueger said. "I don't want to say it's completely unexpected, because we are obviously all following what's happening around the world. But I was on site Sunday afternoon and there was no indication this was even being considered." On Monday, he wondered about the fate of his prize money (a minimum of 18,155 for making the main draw) and directions on when the tour schedule would resume. Andrea Gaudenzi, the new ATP chairman and a former top 20 player, said in his organization's first statement on the cancellation that "the ATP Tour calendar beyond Indian Wells remains as status quo." Absent a government ruling prohibiting mass events, Granik said, the public may have the most to say about which events happen. "I suspect this is going to be more about what your fan base is thinking," he said. "If substantial numbers of people are going to stay away from something, then that might make it hard for whoever is in charge to push forward." Marc Stein reported from Indian Wells, Christopher Clarey from San Francisco, and Matthew Futterman from New York.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The brand new Gawker Media offices in downtown Manhattan are the bomb, as in great. They're all glass and steel, clean lines and modern fixtures. They were paid for in secrets, exposed with a joyful ferocity that enriched Gawker's founders and helped redefine how far our reality TV culture could go to satisfy its appetite for gossip and news about the famous, the powerful and, increasingly, just the mildly interesting. I visited those offices last week in part to find out whether the 140 million in civil awards against Gawker, for showing a private sex tape starring the retired wrestler Hulk Hogan, would be its undoing. But I was after a bigger question: Have we finally found the bottom, or more generously, the limit? After decades of journalistic scandal mongering, each more intrusive than the last and then juiced by the Internet was the jury in Florida that ruled so decisively against Gawker speaking for the entire culture in saying, "Enough"? I do not come at the question from the monastery. I've at times been part of the pack, especially during the early part of my career, which included gossip writing stints at The New York Post and The Daily News. My Daily News bosses once dispatched me to the Los Angeles home of Dr. Paul Crane, the obstetrician tending to the mother of Michael Jackson's children, to find out whether his famous patient's first baby was made the old fashioned way. I showed up at the house on the day of his daughter's bat mitzvah. (Sorry, Dr. Crane!) John F. Kennedy Jr. once caught a colleague and me crouching behind a car while spying on his new bride, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, as she ate breakfast at a neighborhood cafe. Give her a break, he pleaded, she was new to all this. (We called our editors from a pay phone, certain they would allow us to heed the request. "Get back out there," came the reply.) That was all before technology made it easy for a guy named Bubba the Love Sponge to invite his friend Hulk Hogan (real name, Terry Bollea) to have sex with the woman who was then his wife, and to record it so that it finds its way to a popular website, where it could be viewed by millions of visitors and instantly shared with millions more. The jurors believed Mr. Bollea's testimony that he did not know he was being recorded, and that Gawker violated his privacy rights. They also found it infuriating. The 115 million in compensatory damages was 15 million more than Mr. Bollea had asked for. As one juror said on "Good Morning America": "We drew a line." For Gawker, whose parent company has a net worth of roughly 250 million, it was less a line than a hangman's noose. Still, the mood at the offices last week seemed unbowed. Gawker was preparing to file papers on Monday seeking to have the jury's verdict thrown out or the award reduced. It will argue that Mr. Bollea did not prove his right to privacy trumped Gawker's right to cover him aggressively as a world famous former wrestler who has spoken freely about his sexual adventures. "The public figure can't just say, 'I control this conversation,'" Heather Dietrick, Gawker's president and general counsel, told me. "He's out there talking about details of his sex life," she said, continuing to give very specific details anatomical and otherwise about what she had in mind. Not necessarily the stuff to inspire future applicants to the Columbia School of Journalism. And Ms. Dietrick acknowledges the story is "not the Pentagon Papers." But it comports with Gawker's longtime drive to be, as its founder, Nick Denton, says, "Uncompromised and uncompromising" in unearthing whatever might drive reader interest, intrigue, truth and web traffic. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Interestingly, one of Gawker Media's first big hits was a Paris Hilton sex video, which ran on its Fleshbot site in 2003. (Mr. Denton sold Fleshbot in 2012.) Far from threatening to bring the house down, it helped solidify Mr. Denton's company as a real web player. The tape fit with Gawker's sensibility punching up at the arrogance of wealth and celebrity (in this case an heiress who was famously famous for being famous) in the media pirate's tradition of its forebears at Spy magazine. But Spy, as its co founder Kurt Andersen pointed out to me, was not in the constant search for clicks business. And as Gawker's web traffic grew, it got into trouble when it seemed to be meanly punching down, exposing secrets about people who were not so obviously newsworthy. There was the post last summer, for instance, about a relatively unknown married male media executive and his alleged attempt to pay for sex with a male escort. It drew indignant howls, and Gawker retracted the piece. Then there was the decision by Deadspin, a Gawker owned site, to show a random video in 2010 of an inebriated female college student having sex in a bathroom stall. At trial, Hulk Hogan's lawyers presented emails of the woman's desperate entreaties to take it down and Deadspin's lighthearted refusal. "These things do pass," the former Deadspin and Gawker editor, A. J. Daulerio, told her. "Keep your head up." It did not play well with the jury, nor did his reason for later changing his mind: "It was possibly rape." Suddenly, it was not just the fabulously famous Michael Jackson and John F. Kennedy Jr. whose lives we were being invited to peer into; it was people just like us. At the same time, as social media made us stars of our own movies, people like us could increasingly relate to the perils of public exposure once known only by the famous. Mr. Denton told me that this phenomenon played a part in the outcome of the trial. He pointed to a moment when a potential juror described being moved to ask a friend to remove an unflattering photo of her from a Facebook post. Social media, he said, made the jury pool "more sympathetic to the celebrity publicity machine," which makes similar requests. This is all part of the Internet self correction that my colleague John Herrman wrote about a couple of weeks ago, how the public is recoiling from the web's raunchiest offerings. Mr. Denton more or less subscribes to that theory, which is why he recently vowed to make his sites "10 to 15 percent nicer." But it only goes so far. Two of his staff members, Tom Scocca, executive features editor of Gawker, and Emma Carmichael, editor in chief of Jezebel, told me sometimes truth and justice lie in the muck. An item about old accusations of sexual misconduct against Bill Cosby, for instance, helped start the re examination of his treatment of women that led to criminal charges. Deadspin's use of a photo purporting to be a sexted shot of Brett Favre's penis broke open broader sexual harassment allegations against him and his team. Such high minded arguments can be a thin veil when attached to the journalism of exposed genitalia. As Mr. Bollea's lawyer, Charles Harder, argued to me in an interview last week, if there was one thing the founders didn't have in mind when they wrote the First Amendment, it was "uncensored sex tapes and secretly filmed private conversations in a bedroom." Mr. Harder is using Gawker's own mantra about transparency against it saying he will collect his client's due by unmasking a "shroud of secrecy" around Gawker's financial structure. That structure, he says, allows Gawker to divert millions in profits to Kinja, its sister company in Hungary, which runs Gawker's technology platform. Ms. Dietrick of Gawker countered by saying that there was nothing unusual about Gawker's corporate setup and that the company's appeal would preclude any payments related to Mr. Bollea's jury award. Gawker's ability to survive intact depends on whether she is right. Now, the bigger question: Has our culture reached its limit with the invasive and the tawdry? Maybe. But I'm left with a new question: Is that because we've become more decorous toward our public figures? Or does it all seem much creepier when, increasingly, we are the public figures?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
"Wear and Tear: The Threads of My Life," by Tracy Tynan. Scribner, 320 pp., 25. However tough it may be for a parent to cope with a rebellious, volatile child, it is infinitely tougher for a child to wrangle with a rebellious, volatile parent. The costume designer and writer Tracy Tynan grew up with the double burden of two such parents. Her father was the outrageous, lacerating British theater critic and writer Kenneth Tynan; her mother was the volatile, sharp witted American novelist Elaine Dundy (her novel "The Dud Avocado" remains a cult classic). In 1960, when Tracy (named for the Main Line blueblood Tracy Lord, played by her godmother, Katharine Hepburn, in "The Philadelphia Story") was 8, she was at home in London, watching television, when her mother teetered toward the room, stark naked, "clutching a bottle of champagne she was trying to pour into a glass," and began swaying in the doorway. The au pair, taking in the sight, said in a "singsong matter of fact voice" to Tracy's mother, "Don't you think you ought to put some clothes on, Mrs. Tynan?" In "Wear and Tear," Ms. Tynan's memoir of her life as the daughter of these bumptious bumper car parents, she recalls that when they would scream, rage and throw tantrums when she was little, she would wrap herself in her mother's "silky, soft sealskin coat" to insulate herself from the fracas, even as their drama compelled her. "Watching them was like watching a horror movie, scary but riveting," she writes. A parade of movie stars regularly passed through the Tynan household in Mayfair (Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich, Maggie Smith, Orson Welles), and the hosts' day to day theatrics rivaled the performances of their guests. When the family lived briefly in New York, where Kenneth Tynan reviewed Broadway shows for The New Yorker, the glittering throng expanded to include Sidney Lumet and Gloria Vanderbilt, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, Tennessee Williams, Leonard Bernstein and Mary Martin (on whose lap young Tracy threw up, in a stretch limo, after watching the star perform in "Peter Pan"). "My parents were the original celebrity hounds," Ms. Tynan writes. "They relentlessly and unabashedly pursued famous people." They behaved no more decorously with their illustrious entourage than with their child. "Both my parents seemed to revel in humiliation in front of each other and in public, trying their best to be the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald of the '50s," she recalls. In the mid '60s, the couple divorced, and a few years later, Kenneth Tynan married the journalist and writer Kathleen Halton, with whom he had two children, Roxana and Matthew. Meanwhile, Elaine Dundy ("She was always Elaine, never Mother," Ms. Tynan writes), slalomed from one rehab center to another. Early on, Ms. Tynan had begun to dress as the distinct persona she aspired to be, finding empowerment in choosing her own wardrobe. "Trying on clothes gave me an opportunity, albeit briefly, to test out different identities," she explains. Her defining purchase, made when she was 14, was a pair of expensive apple green shoes with a bow at the front. "In a world where most everything else felt out of control, having control over the clothes I wore filled a hole," she writes. She wore those apple green shoes proudly for more than two years: They signaled "the beginning of walking on my own two feet, walking away from my parents and toward freedom." By that time, she was spending most of her time at boarding school, away from the mayhem of home. Even so, distance and retail therapy could not protect her from the intermittent buffets of her parents' excesses, whether it was her drunken mother muzzily lurching at her with a carving knife on holiday, or her father causing an international media uproar by swearing on the BBC. After that stunt, she writes, people "assumed I must be both sexually liberated and an easy lay." In fact, she remained a virgin until she was 20, when, dressed in "a vintage blouse and a long Ossie Clark skirt, cut on the bias and made out of panels of purple and red Liberty printed fabric, covered in tiny roses," she achieved her deflowering with the help of a trendy magazine editor. He was shocked to discover it was her first time, what with "your dad and all," he stammered. After, she writes, "I put on my beautiful skirt and wept." Slowly, Ms. Tynan expanded her wardrobe and her self assurance, attending Sarah Lawrence, then moving to Los Angeles. By coincidence, her father and his new family moved to Los Angeles a few months later, and before long and not by coincidence Elaine Dundy moved to California, too. Ms. Tynan, who understandably had "mixed feelings" about the proximity, resolutely patched together a separate path for herself. She made a documentary on the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, "A Great Bunch of Girls," then fell in love with a film director, Jim McBride, who had a young son, Jesse, from a previous marriage. The two of them married, and hours after the wedding, they returned to their hotel to find an urgent message for her husband: Richard Gere had agreed to act in Mr. McBride's remake of the film "Breathless." Mr. McBride enlisted his new wife to assist the costume designer J. Allen Highfill, and Ms. Tynan discovered that she had a natural talent for "dressing other people besides myself" not to mention a knack for navigating big egos. She went on to do costume design for "Choose Me," "The Big Easy" and other movies, and along the way had two children with Mr. McBride, Matthew and Ruby.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Bayern Munich's numbers, Lyon Manager Rudi Garcia had said, were so intimidating that they were best ignored. Unbeaten since early December. Flawless, with not so much as a point dropped, in 19 consecutive games. Scoring goals at an eye watering rate. "If we just look at the statistics," Garcia had said before Lyon faced Bayern in the Champions League semifinal on Wednesday night in Lisbon, "we might as well watch the game in the hotel." Lyon could not, in the end, stop Bayern's big red machine from rolling on to its first Champions League final since winning the competition in 2013. Two goals from Serge Gnabry the first a bone shaking finish from the edge of the penalty area, the second a scrappy tap in effectively settled the game before halftime. Robert Lewandowski, scoring his 55th goal of the season and his 15th in this season's Champions League, added a third on a header in the 88th minute. Lewandowski has 15 goals in this season's Champions League, even without the second legs here in Portugal, and that puts him in reach of Cristiano Ronaldo's record of 17 in a single campaign. Did Coutinho just score? Yes, and no. Two minutes after he sent a curling shot just wide, Coutinho actually puts the ball in the net. There's a moment of confusion, though, and no celebration, as the referee calmly explains why there's no goal. It appears that, while Coutinho was onside as he broke behind the defense after the cross at the penalty spot, Goretzka appeared to touch the ball on its way through. That touch immediately rendered Coutinho now behind the last defender offside. No goal. Gnabry is substituted. If there was a crowd, it'd be on its feet. A day to remember for the 25 year old Gnabry: two goals in a Champions League semifinal. He trots off and is replaced by Philippe Coutinho. Just another reminder of the embarrassment of riches that is the Bayern bench. There is a pattern emerging from these semifinals quite an obvious one, really, but still: clubs whose status dictates that they must be based around developing and selling young players cannot cope, head to head, toe to toe, with the teams who ultimately benefit from the development of those players. Bayern has a star alumnus of Lyon's academy, Corentin Tolisso, on the bench. He's on the bench because he is not good enough to start, because being among the best players at Lyon is only enough to be one of many at Bayern. It is not quite that simple, of course, but as an illustration, it is. In that context, Lyon has done well to make a game of it, crafting two good chances before Serge Gnabry's first goal, and occasionally looking menacing before his second. That may be as much as it can hope to achieve, though, realistically. Bayern is one of Europe's predators. Lyon has long been prey. That is the balance of their relationship, and that is the dynamic of the game. Bayern leads at the break and this feels familiar. Bayern strolls off at the half with a 2 0 lead. That's 10 goals in two games in Lisbon. Lyon? They're wondering what hit them. (Hint: It was Serge Gnabry, mostly.) That should have been three. Gnabry with a tantalizing cross from the right narrowly misses the left post. Lewandowski could have turned it in with a simple touch, and he's kicking himself for, well, not kicking the ball. Oops. It has been only a couple of months since Jean Michel Aulas declared that this would all be quite impossible. France's soccer authorities had declared an end to the Ligue 1 season with 10 games still remaining in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, and Aulas, the owner and president of Olympique Lyonnais, was simmering. Not only would the cancellation cost French clubs revenue, time and players, Aulas said, not only would it deprive his team of the chance to improve on its standing it sat seventh in the league table when the season was stopped, meaning it faced the prospect of a first season outside European competition in more than a decade but it would hamstring the attempts of the two French representatives of the Champions League. Aulas's theory was simple, and it was widely held: Lyon and Paris St. Germain, the two French teams still alive in the knockout rounds, would return to the Champions League cold, weakened with ring rust, against opponents in the full flush of the season. "In August, we are going to meet teams in these competitions who have been able to prepare better than us," he had said in the spring. On Tuesday night, P.S.G. became the first French team to reach a Champions League final since Monaco in 2004. On Wednesday, Lyon can join its great rival, though there is the rather intimidating bulwark of Bayern Munich fresh off an 8 2 victory against Barcelona standing in the way. Never a man to let facts get in the way of his opinion, Aulas suggested, after P.S.G. rallied to eliminate Atalanta and Lyon shocked Manchester City in the quarterfinals, that a "little bit of luck" had erased the competitive disadvantage the French teams had been handed. Lyon will need that to hold this evening. Bayern has looked imperious since European soccer's restart since Hansi Flick took charge in November, in fact culminating in that coldblooded demolition of Barcelona. The general rule of European soccer is that the team with the greater resources and the better players will win, and in that sense this is as big a mismatch as P.S.G.'s victory against RB Leipzig on Tuesday. That said, Bayern's high back line a feature of its front foot approach saw it caught out early a few times against Barcelona. It was fortunate not to get burned, and the rout was soon on, but Manchester City scored first against Manchester City by taking advantage of a similar chance. So it knows as well as any team that an opponent's aggressive nature can be turned against it. Lyon's Houssem Aouar has been here before. As a boy. Aouar, Lyon's promising 22 year old midfielder, has grown up in the club. He joined Lyon as an 11 year old amateur in 2009, and over the years has developed into one of the club's top talents since making his debut as an 18 year old in 2017. He wears the No. 8 jersey, which was given to him when its previous bearer, Corentin Tolisso, joined Bayern Munich three years ago. But that, he noted on social media this morning, is not his only Bayern Lyon connection. Wednesday's winner will face Paris St. Germain, which outclassed RB Leipzig in Tuesday's first semifinal, in the final on Sunday at Benfica's Estadio da Luz. The game will be P.S.G.'s first appearance in the final, and the culmination of a yearslong project by its Qatari owners to build a world beating team. It has not always gone well for P.S.G. But as Rory wrote Tuesday night: After all the wrong turns, all the heartache and disappointment, the humiliations and the turnarounds and the gut wrenching collapses, Paris St. Germain has finally done what it was designed and built to do. This year marked P.S.G.'s first appearance in the semifinals since 1995 long before both the arrival of the club's Qatari owners and even the birth of Kylian Mbappe and the club has, in recent years, developed a habit of falling short when faced with one of Europe's giants. But it has everything it needs to compete this time: the world's most expensive player in Neymar, arguably its best young player in Mbappe, and the grit and drive and luck that has been missing in past runs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
One of the W.N.B.A.'s original franchises could soon have a new owner. An investment group led by the billionaire Joseph C. Tsai, who completed the purchase of a 49 percent stake in the Nets in April, is close to an agreement to purchase the Liberty, according to a person briefed on the negotiations who was not authorized to comment publicly. The Madison Square Garden Company, which owns the Liberty as well as the Knicks, the Rangers and Madison Square Garden itself, announced 14 months ago that it was seeking to sell the team. It said the team had lost money in each year of its existence, a deficit of more than 100 million in total. After playing its first 21 seasons at the Garden, the Liberty spent last season in the decidedly less glamorous Westchester County Center in White Plains. It is not yet clear whether Tsai's group will seek to rebrand the Liberty or have them play elsewhere. The W.N.B.A. season begins in May, and the team's schedule currently has them playing their home games in White Plains.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Credit...Tyler Schiffman Have you ever seen a giant larvacean, the tiny sea squirt that lives inside a giant mucus house? How about a wildly iridescent bloodybelly comb jelly? If not, you're far from alone. In the deepest, darkest parts of the world's oceans, mysterious and remarkable animals abound. But because of the immense cost and logistical challenges involved in exploring those depths, only a handful of scientists, engineers and well financed explorers such as James Cameron have been able to see these creatures in the flesh. However, life in the deep sea may soon be accessible to all. Public aquariums around the world are spending millions of dollars on research and development aimed at putting deep sea animals on display. Leading the effort is California's Monterey Bay Aquarium, which plans to spend 15 million over the next two years to create the world's first large scale exhibition of deep sea life, a 10,400 square foot display named "Into the Deep: Exploring our Undiscovered Ocean." The Monterey Bay Aquarium and its partner organization, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), both backed by the Packard Foundation, have two large ships and several remotely operated vehicles at their disposal, some with robotic arms, high definition cameras, state of the art sensors and a variety of devices designed to suck and grab delicate deep sea animals from the water. Many of these organisms possess soft, gelatinous bodies an adaptation to the physical pressures of the ocean depths, but which at sea level provides all the structural integrity of a wet Kleenex. With the advance of technology, it is finally becoming possible to bring some of these fragile beings to the surface. On a sunny day in mid February, before the coronavirus pandemic halted operations, scientists from MBARI and aquarists from Monterey Bay headed out aboard the Rachel Carson, a 135 foot long deep sea research vessel. They were searching Monterey Bay's submarine canyon for bottom dwelling species to scoop up, study and hopefully put on display. Their task was daunting. The creatures they sought were hidden by darkness in an underwater canyon that, although starting just hundreds of feet from shore, is as deep and steep as the Grand Canyon. In the ship's control room, the song "Under Pressure," by Queen and David Bowie, played as pilots from the research institute directed the Ventana, one of their larger remote operated vehicles. "We're looking for things that are going to look good and are representative of what's actually down here," said Paul Clarkson, the aquarium's director of husbandry operations. Mr. Clarkson and the other researchers watched as the pilots directed the vehicle's robotic arm to grab a modified household spatula from an internal compartment and gently wedge it under the sea star. "Can you come in from there?" said DJ Osborne, one of the Ventana's pilots, pointing to the right side of the star. "I don't know, man, these things are not easy," replied Scott Hansen, Mr. Osborne's co pilot. "They're stuck like Velcro." Several of the sea star's arms soon popped off. The pilots decided to leave the dismembered organism on the seafloor, where it would have a better chance of survival. A few minutes later the crew found another specimen sitting on a thick layer of detritus. With a few flicks of the wrist, the pilots scooped up the invertebrate and deposited it in a drawer on the vehicle. After more than five hours in the midnight zone, the vehicle returned to the surface with its drawers and cylinders full of sea stars, nudibranchs, worms and sponges. With the exception of a few sea stars, all the animals collected that day are alive and well at the aquarium. Over the past two decades, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has attempted to keep dozens of different deep sea species alive in captivity. Most of the early attempts failed, but each one has revealed something new about the needs of deep sea species. Alicia Bitondo, a senior aquarist at the aquarium, is familiar with the challenges of caring for these creatures. Back in February, Ms. Bitondo prepared a meal in a dark, cramped room in the back of the aquarium for one of her favorite organisms, a salmon snailfish named "O.G." This bottom dwelling, deep sea fish, found off the coast of Japan, looks less like a fish and more like a wad of pink chewing gum that has spent several hours in a hot car. The aquarium acquired O.G. in June 2019 with the goal of figuring out whether the species could be kept alive in captivity. "When he first came in, he wasn't eating at all," Ms. Bitondo said, grabbing a pinch of krill from a plastic cup. "Now I can hand feed him." She deposited a few krill into O.G.'s tank and within seconds the morsels were in the maw of the squishy pink fish. "You're such a piggy," she said, gently tickling the fish's chin. Salmon snailfish have whisker like pectoral fins below their mouths that are equipped with taste buds. Tickling these weird whiskers, Ms. Bitondo has found, is a great way to stimulate the fish's appetite. Recreating an environment as extreme as the deep sea is an enormous undertaking. The average temperature down there is just 39 degrees Fahrenheit, and the pressure can exceed 5,000 pounds the approximate weight of a rhino per square inch. In the early days of deep sea aquarium design, aquarists believed that deep sea animals had to be kept in pressurized tanks. However, researchers recently discovered that many deep sea species can survive at sea level if slowly acclimated. One of the biggest challenges aquarists now face is getting the temperature, acidity, oxygen and light levels just right. To keep O.G. and other deep sea animals healthy, the aquarium developed a seawater system using filtration technology first developed by the pharmaceutical industry. The water pumped into the tanks by the system is bone chillingly cold and nearly devoid of oxygen, which is exactly how the aquarium's deep sea animals like it. The aquarium made an earlier attempt at putting deep sea life on display in 1999 with a 7,000 square foot exhibit called "Mysteries of the Deep." It featured deep sea crabs, corals, sharks, sea stars and tunicates from the ocean's twilight zone. The exhibit was successful, and left many aquarium employees wanting more. One was Tommy Knowles, a senior aquarist who has been with the aquarium for over 17 years. He was part of the team that figured out how to culture gelatinous comb jellies. "The best part of my job is working on projects that people said were impossible, and ultimately having success," he said. "So for instance, the bloodybelly comb jelly. It was considered basically impossible to keep these animals in an aquarium because they are so fragile." Now the aquarium can keep them alive for a period thought to be close to their natural life span. "Anyone who sees this animal is going to be blown away by it," Mr. Knowles said. The creatures have transparent hairlike cilia that propel them through the water, diffracting light and creating a dazzling display of colors. "When we first studied it, it was so sensitive to temperature changes that as we photographed it in the lab, the temperature of the water in the containers warmed up by a couple of degrees and then all of a sudden the water was red and the animal was gone," said George Matsumoto, a senior education and research specialist at MBARI who first described the organism as a separate species. "It's that delicate. "The fact that the aquarium is keeping them alive is amazing." For scientists such as Dr. Matsumoto, the breakthroughs in deep sea animal husbandry made by the aquarium have created opportunities to study deep sea organisms in greater detail than ever before. When scientists explore the deep sea with advanced scuba equipment, submarines and remotely operated vehicles, they "only get a glimpse" into the lives of the animals that exist there, Dr. Rocha said. "We don't get any information about their behavior, how they mate, what they eat or how they live," he said. "But when we have them in an aquarium, we can see all of that." The role that public aquariums play in society has changed since the first ones were built in the mid 19th century. Those primarily exhibited local fish species and offered visitors information on the best ways to cook and consume them. Today, aquariums are places where scientists can study marine life up close, and visitors can learn about their inherent connection to the marine world. "Many people's first encounter with ocean life is at an aquarium," said Kevin Connor, the aquarium's director of communications. It is for this reason that most modern aquariums, especially those accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, stress the importance of marine conservation to visitors. In creating the world's first large scale exhibition of life in the deep sea, the Monterey Bay Aquarium hopes to do just that. "The deep sea is so important," said Kyle Van Houtan, the aquarium's chief scientist. "It's the largest living space on our planet, but people don't really have access to it, so it's up to us to bring it to them." The aquarium's forthcoming exhibit will take visitors on a tour of the midnight zone, starting in the mid water with bioluminescent jellyfish and cephalopods, and ending on the seafloor with whale bones crawling with Japanese spider crabs and other seafloor scavengers. Although scientists have only begun to scratch the surface when it comes understanding of life down there, it is clear that human activities are having catastrophic and long lasting impacts on deep sea ecosystems around the world. "The deep is the engine that drives life in our oceans," Dr. Van Houtan said. "It's the beating heart of our climate system. But we are exploiting the deep in ways we never have before, so I think it's time to talk about this and to tell everyone about the importance of the deep." Fishing trawlers drag nets across the seafloor, destroying deep sea coral reefs that took tens of thousands of years to form. Miners bore into the seabed in search of copper, nickel, aluminum, lithium and cobalt, stirring up sediment and exposing deep dwelling species to noise and, often, chemical pollution. Dr. Van Houtan hopes that when visitors will discover that the ocean's midnight zone is a part of our planet that is as worthy of protection as any other.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science

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