Author: NY TIMES

The future of “Inside the NBA” was already a sensitive topic when Charles Barkley stepped into an elevator in Minneapolis after Game 2 of the Western Conference finals late Friday night. Barkley’s on-air candor as an analyst is a key reason that the studio show has become so influential and beloved among basketball fans and around the league.But these are tense times for the show and those who work on it. Warner Bros. Discovery has not secured the rights to continue broadcasting N.B.A. games on TNT beyond next season. Without those, the long-term future of “Inside the NBA” is uncertain.…

A dozen years ago, John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Fla., sent voters an email posing as a county commissioner, urging them to oppose the re-election of the county’s sheriff.He later masqueraded online as a Russian tech worker with a pseudonym, BadVolf, to leak confidential information in violation of state law, fooling officials in Florida who thought they were dealing with a foreigner.He also posed as a fictional New York City heiress he called Jessica, tricking an adviser to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office into divulging improper conduct by the department.“And boy, did he…

Think for a minute about the little bumps on your tongue. You probably saw a diagram of those taste bud arrangements once in a biology textbook — sweet sensors at the tip, salty on either side, sour behind them, bitter in the back.But the idea that specific tastes are confined to certain areas of the tongue is a myth that “persists in the collective consciousness despite decades of research debunking it,” according to a review published this month in The New England Journal of Medicine. Also wrong: the notion that taste is limited to the mouth.The old diagram, which has…

Eleven members of Steiger Butte Drum sat in a circle around a large elk-hide drum at the front of the stage of Cincinnati’s Music Hall last Thursday. Washes of sound from the orchestra behind them built and receded in grand waves.The group was the concerto soloist, of a kind, in “Natural History” by Michael Gordon, one of the Bang on a Can composers who infused Minimalism with rough, rebellious energy in the 1980s. A few times over the course of the 25-minute piece, Steiger Butte Drum, a traditional percussion and vocal ensemble of the Klamath Tribes of Native Americans in…

The bombs used in the Israeli strike that killed dozens of Palestinians in a camp for displaced people in Rafah on Sunday were made in the United States, according to weapons experts and visual evidence reviewed by The New York Times.Munition debris filmed at the strike location the next day was remnants from a GBU-39, a bomb designed and manufactured in the United States, The Times found. U.S. officials have been pushing Israel to use more of this type of bomb, which they say can reduce civilian casualties.The key detail in the weapon debris was the tail actuation system, which…

U.S. officials said on Tuesday that the Israeli strike that killed dozens of Palestinians in southern Gaza was a tragedy but that it did not violate President Biden’s red line for withholding weapons shipments to Israel.The bloodshed came after Mr. Biden warned earlier this month that the United States would block certain arms transfers if Israel targeted heavily populated areas in Rafah — a warning that has been tested regularly as the war has ground on.John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, said the deaths were “devastating” but that the scale of the attack was not enough to change U.S.…

The lines between college and the NFL have blurred in recent years as run options and run/pass options (RPO) have become legitimate parts of NFL programs, but one of the things college and NFL coordinators must prepare for each week is There is still a gap between them. However, that hasn’t stopped teams from tapping into college teams to fill coordinator positions. In fact, all four coordinators hired this offseason are from the NCAA: Buccaneers OC Liam Cohen, Chargers DC Jesse Minter, Packers DC Jeff Hafley and Seahawks OC Ryan Grubb .Is this recruiting cycle an anomaly or a sign…

In 1944, King George VI gave his daughter Elizabeth a corgi named Susan for her 18th birthday. The future queen adored the breed and later helped make these small working dogs into a royal mainstay.In recent years, social media has boosted the breed’s popularity. “They are just so photogenic,” Dan McLemore, a corgi enthusiast, said during the Summer Corgi Nationals, an event held in Arcadia, Calif. “They are short, stocky, funny-looking, active — and they just always look like they are smiling all the time.” Source link

ConocoPhillips agreed on Wednesday to acquire its smaller rival, Marathon Oil, the latest deal in a wave of consolidation sweeping the oil industry.The all-stock deal values Marathon at $22.5 billion, including debt. The acquisition “further deepens our portfolio and fits within our financial framework, adding high-quality, low cost of supply inventory,” Ryan Lance, Conoco’s chief executive, said in a statement.Marathon’s operations are in some of the most sought-after oil fields in New Mexico, North Dakota and Texas, and it also drills in the waters offshore of Equatorial Guinea.Major oil companies have pulled off some of the biggest acquisitions of the…

Few debates have raged longer and more contentiously in the computing industry than one: Is “open source” better than “closed” when it comes to software development?That debate has been revived as companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft have diverged on how to compete for supremacy in artificial intelligence systems. Some are choosing a closed model while others espouse an open approach.Here’s what to know.What does open-source software mean?Source code makes up the underlying building blocks of the apps you use. Developers can write tens of thousands of lines of source code to create programs that will run on a…