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      Is Fake Grass Safe? A Manufacturer Sues to Stop a Discussion.

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      Four experts were sued for defamation ahead of a seminar where they planned to talk about research into the potential health risks on playgrounds and sports fields nationwide.The seminar seemed straightforward enough. Four experts planned to talk about whether artificial grass, which is used on playgrounds and sports fields nationwide, has health risks for children.But January’s seminar never happened, after the four speakers were sued for defamation by Polyloom, an artificial-turf maker, based on promotional material for the seminar.“This was before we even said a word,” said Kyla Bennett, an ecologist formerly with the Environmental Protection Agency who is one of the four defendants.Polyloom and the artificial-turf industry is responding to a growing body of scientific research showing the presence of harmful chemicals in synthetic turf, and potential environmental and health implications. All this is happening as demand for artificial turf, which is made from plastic and mimics the look and feel of natural grass, is booming globally.Once mainly used in places like professional football or baseball stadiums, today, artificial grass is common in city parks, community playgrounds and fields for high-school football and soccer. It’s even in some suburban backyards where homeowners want to avoid the need to water or mow the lawn.Between 1,200 and 1,500 large artificial turf fields were installed in 2023, bringing the total in the United States to around 19,000 fields, according to the latest figures from AMI Plastics, an industry data organization.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Independent Hospitality Coalition Gives L.A. Restaurants Hope

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      Last Tuesday, Valerie Gordon made an Instagram video about new signs she had posted around her small Los Angeles restaurant reading “Private: Employees Only.” She explained that they marked all nonpublic areas of the restaurant that would be off limits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a raid.The scale of the response to the post shocked her. Ms. Gordon estimated that it had already been viewed more than 500,000 times and shared widely across the Los Angeles restaurant industry.“What that showed to me is there is a need for this information, there is a deep need, and people don’t really know what to do,” Ms. Gordon said.But she had some help with the post. The guidance Ms. Gordon described came from the Independent Hospitality Coalition, a small, scrappy advocacy group which has emerged as an organizing hub for the Los Angeles restaurant industry.Founded during the pandemic, the I.H.C. is one of a number organizations, local and national, which are trying to bring together isolated, competing restaurant businesses. The coalition’s main mission is to help business cut through red tape like liquor permitting processes and promote more restaurant-friendly legislation at the state level. But in Los Angeles in the last five years, a rolling series of major disruptions — from the pandemic itself, to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to the 2023 Hollywood strikes to the wildfires in January — has made operating a restaurant an uncertain proposition.And then came the ICE raids and the deployment of the National Guard.Eddie Navarrette, the executive director of the Independent Hospitality Coalition, said the years since Covid have brought successive upheavals to Los Angeles that have negatively affected restaurant business.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Was Basketball Invented in Herkimer, NY? The Human Calculator Thinks So.

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      The official story is that Dr. James Naismith invented basketball in Springfield, Mass., in 1891. But what about the teenager tossing cabbages in upstate New York a year earlier?Just off the too-quiet Main Street in the upstate New York town of Herkimer, a man sat in a booth at Crazy Otto’s Empire Diner, making his case. Between bites of two eggs, three pancakes and a ham slice the size of a paperback, he politely defied accepted American lore.His case goes like this: Basketball was invented not by Dr. James Naismith in Springfield, Mass., in 1891, as everyone is taught, but by a Herkimer teenager who came up with the idea first, about a year earlier, while tossing heads of cabbage into a basket.Before you say, “Check, please,” know that this stocky, white-haired heretic isn’t some random Herkimer eccentric; he is the Human Calculator, also known as Scott Flansburg, who has astonished people around the world with his ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide vast numbers with finger-snap speed. He may be the most notable Herkimer native since the Herkimer Hurricane himself, Lou Ambers, world lightweight boxing champion of the 1930s.But Mr. Flansburg has set aside his wizardry to champion what he argues is his hometown’s rightful place in sports history, and he says he has receipts — well, some receipts. He has assembled a group of local leaders and created the nonprofit Herkimer 9 Foundation, dedicated to an admittedly improbable pursuit: to revitalize this town with a basketball-related museum, a basketball-related events center and even a pavilion topped with the world’s largest basketball.“Basketball was invented on our Main Street,” Mr. Flansburg, 61, said, nodding toward the nearby avenue where there’s a lot not happening.Herkimer, once bustling, has become another largely abandoned town along the Erie Canal in New York.Patrick Dodson for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      China’s Spy Agencies Are Investing Heavily in A.I., Researchers Say

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      A new report comes amid rising concern about how China will use new tools to power covert actions, as Western intelligence services also embrace the technology.Chinese spy services have invested heavily in artificial intelligence to create new tools to speed analysis, provide early warning of threats and potentially help shape operational plans during a war, according to a new report.China, like the United States, hopes that artificial intelligence will improve the efficiency and accuracy of its intelligence analysis, allowing it to collect more intelligence and analyze it faster and more cheaply.The study, by Recorded Future’s Insikt Group, which studies cybersecurity and other threats from nation-states, terrorists and criminal groups, comes amid rising concern about how Chinese spy agencies will use A.I. to power covert actions, as Western intelligence services also embrace the technology.The researchers reviewed patent applications by the People’s Liberation Army, publicly available contracts and other material to better understand how China’s military and intelligence services have invested in artificial intelligence.Recorded Future found that China is probably using a mix of large language models, technology that can analyze huge amounts of data and communicate its results in human language. Meta and OpenAI are thought to be among the American models that China is using, along with Chinese models from DeepSeek, Zhipu AI and others.The C.I.A. and other American spy agencies have stepped up their use of artificial intelligence, both to improve analytic work and to help overseas operatives remain undiscovered. One tool developed by the C.I.A. is designed to help analysts assess the positions of foreign leaders, creating virtual versions of the officials that are powered by artificial intelligence.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An-My Lê: The War in Vietnam Still Holds America’s Attention

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      Re-enacting battles from Vietnam demonstrates how war can be mythologized.This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.I was born in Saigon in 1960, and I experienced the war in Vietnam firsthand. When the war ended and Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975, the U.S. government evacuated me and my family in a C-130 cargo plane. We ended up in California. Now, 50 years later, I work as a landscape photographer, viewing my medium not only as a tool for witnessing past and present conflicts, but also as a space suited for contending with the paradoxes that define history itself.One particularly pivotal experience shaped my approach.It began in 1999, when I contacted a group of war re-enactors based in North Carolina and Virginia. I worked with and photographed them over several summers, and the images eventually became a series titled “Small Wars.” This small group of young, conservative men was dedicated to recreating key U.S. military operations and battles from the war in Vietnam on one member’s 100-acre wooded property. Among them were a product manager at Thomson Financial, a former National Guard driver, a mortician and a carpenter. Too young to have served in the conflict, none of these men had ever experienced real combat. Yet they were obsessively committed to the authenticity of their “impressions” — meticulous in their attention to equipment, clothing, food and supplies, whether portraying the Vietcong, the North Vietnamese Army or American soldiers. Participation was by invitation only.“Cots,” from the series “Small Wars” (1999-2002).Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman GalleryTo engage with multiple perspectives, I alternated between the role of a Vietcong fighter and that of a Kit Carson Scout — an N.V.A. soldier who defected to assist the Americans. Armed with an AK-47 loaded with Hollywood blanks, and clad in either Vietnamese-made black pajamas or an N.V.A. khaki uniform, I walked the trails and immersed myself in the dense bamboo thickets the re-enactors had planted. This vegetation — an obvious signifier for Vietnam and other Asian landscapes — was incongruously situated in an area that once witnessed the U.S. Civil War, on a site densely populated by pines, spruce, horsetails and kudzu. The result was a striking conflation of histories: theirs, shaped by vicarious experiences filtered through news footage, literature and myth; and mine, formed by personal memory, family lore and ambivalent feelings about a devastating war — one perpetrated by a government that ultimately saved my family and me from Communism and granted us a new life.The re-enactors and I spontaneously connected through a shared fluency brought on by the popularization and retelling of the Vietnam War in popular culture. We bantered back and forth, testing one another’s knowledge of classic war films, as well as fiction and nonfiction books. One-time participants from other states occasionally joined us, and the organizers would disclose my participation only at the last minute as a “reveal” for the unsuspecting visitors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Is Crashing Out? The Rise of a Useful Slang Term.

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      Adrenaline rising? Patience waning? Gen Z embraces a slang term for familiar feelings.Alejandra Toro was struggling. Everything was going wrong at the same time, she was overwhelmed and she felt as if she was about to have a meltdown. She was crashing out.Ms. Toro, a 30-year-old project manager, documented her “crash out” in a video that has raced to more than 600,000 views, joining the ranks of countless TikTok users who have employed some iteration of the phrase to describe their burst of emotions — and at times, intentional overreactions.“It’s a joking way to explain, like, this could get really bad, really quick,” Ms. Toro said in an interview.There’s no precise definition of the phrase, and both the severity of its meaning and its use cases seem to run the gamut. A fiery confrontation with an ex, an irritated exchange with a parent or a full emotional breakdown can all qualify. But its popularity is undeniable.An entry for the term was recently added to Among the New Words, a dictionary that is part of a quarterly installment of the journal American Speech. It described “crash out” as “a feeling beyond tiredness, a frustration or exhaustion toward something or someone that you throw all care out the window and have a full blown outburst.” (“Crash out” was a runner-up for the publication’s 2024 word of the year — “rawdog” took the title.)Philip Lindsay, a 31-year-old special education teacher and content creator who goes by Mr. Lindsay on social media, said he has heard the phrase used mostly as a signal from students that they’re frustrated.“It’s kind of this forewarning of like, ‘Hey you’re annoying me, I’m going to crash out,’” he said, “or like, ‘This project I’m working on is going to make me crash out.’”

      @_alejthegreat LMAO I start tweaking when my makeup doesn’t cooperate 😂 ♬ original sound – Alej ✨ We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Senate Bill Would Make Deep Cuts to Medicaid, Setting Up Fight With House

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      The proposal would salvage some clean-energy tax credits and phase out others more slowly, making up some of the cost by imposing deeper cuts to Medicaid than the House-passed bill would.Senate Republicans on Monday released legislation that would cut Medicaid far more aggressively than would the House-passed bill to deliver President Trump’s domestic agenda, while also salvaging or slowing the elimination of some clean-energy tax credits, setting up a fight over their party’s marquee policy package.The measure, released by the Senate Finance Committee, contains the core provisions of that chamber’s version of the legislation that Republicans muscled through the House last month and are hoping to speed through the Senate and deliver to Mr. Trump’s desk by July 4. But its differences with that bill are substantial and are all but certain to complicate the measure’s path to enactment, casting doubt on that timetable.Most notably, the proposal would take a slower and less sweeping approach to phasing out clean-energy tax credits created during the Biden administration, and cover part of the cost of doing so by imposing deeper and more expansive cuts to Medicaid.While the House measure would add a new work requirement to Medicaid for childless adults, the Senate proposal would expand its application to the parents of older children. It also would crack down even harder than the House bill on strategies that many states have developed to tax medical providers and pay them higher prices for Medicaid services.In making the case for the bill, Republicans focused on another, far more politically popular element of the measure: its extension of tax cuts that were enacted in 2017 and are set to expire at the end of the year.A $7,500 tax credit for buyers of electric cars would phase out immediately within 180 days of the bill passing into law.Lauren Justice for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Senate Proposal Ends Tax Cuts for Clean Energy, Disappointing Climate Advocates

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      A Senate tax package softens some blows imposed on renewables by a House version of the bill. But it still terminates many credits for clean power.Climate advocates, Democrats, and even some House Republicans who last month had supported a tax package that gutted federal support for clean energy were hoping the Senate would make fixes to protect energy manufacturing and jobs.But on Monday, Senate Republicans disappointed them, proposing to quickly end most tax breaks for wind and solar power, electric vehicles and other clean energy.Draft legislation released by the Senate Finance Committee would terminate or scale back most of the major tax incentives for clean energy contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the Biden administration’s signature climate law.The plan would eliminate within six months a $7,500 consumer tax credit for purchases of electric vehicles as well as home energy rebates for things like electric heat pumps and induction stoves. A tax credit for homeowners who install solar panels on rooftops would end within 180 days. A subsidy for making hydrogen fuels would expire this year.Federal tax credits for wind and solar power, which have been in place for decades but were made more lucrative under the Inflation Reduction Act, would be rapidly phased out. Wind and solar companies could qualify for the full tax break only if they began construction in the next six months. They would receive 60 percent of the tax break if they began construction in 2026, and 20 percent of the tax credit if they began construction in 2027. Projects built after that would get nothing.That’s a slightly longer runway for renewable energy than is in the House version of the bill, which would have ended those tax breaks almost immediately.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More