Latest news with #Benesh
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
EPA proposes easing PFAS regulations
Persistent and highly prevalent: that summarizes the PFAS situation in Massachusetts, where at least 170 water systems have high levels of the forever chemicals — some of which have been linked to cancer. But the state is hardly alone. The Environmental Working Group has identified thousands of PFAS contaminated sites across the country. PFAS chemicals were discovered around ninety years ago and have been used in a variety of applications — from consumer goods to firefighting equipment and foam. It is believed that in the latter capacity PFAS compounds entered water systems. In April 2024, the EPA moved to begin cleaning up the PFAS mess. It adopted rules setting limits on contamination for five separate PFAS chemicals and a category for mixtures. The rules required water systems to complete an initial phase of testing for PFAS compounds by 2027 — and to meet Maximum Contamination Levels (MCL) by 2029. But EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, appointed by President Donald Trump, announced Wednesday a plan to ease those regulations. Zeldin said the changes would introduce 'common-sense flexibility' into the PFAS equation — first, by extending the compliance date by two years to 2031. Zeldin said this would be particularly helpful to small, rural water companies that may be struggling to meet the previous date. While Zeldin is not proposing to change the MCLs for two PFAS compounds: PFOS and PFOA — both set at 4 parts per trillion during the Biden Administration — he plans to rescind the standards on three other PFAS compounds and on PFAS mixtures that were part of the rules adopted last year. Zeldin said rescinding those standards would be followed by a review to check for legal compliance under the Safe Drinking Water Act. But environmentalists said that, if adopted, Zeldin's PFAS proposals would harm public health. 'Americans have been exposed to these chemicals for decades,' said Melanie Benesh, Vice-President of Government Affairs for the Environmental Working Group. 'They're forever chemicals, so they don't break down in the environment and they build up in the human body and are toxic at very low levels.' PFAS chemicals persist because of a simple organic chemistry fact: they contain multiple carbon-fluorine bonds, which are among the strongest chemical bonds possible. Benesh said there is no good reason to delay PFAS remediation. 'The science is incredibly clear and incredibly well-established on all six of these chemicals that they are toxic at very low amounts,' she said. 'PFOA and PFOS have been linked to certain kinds of cancer.' Benesh said the other compounds, while not found to be carcinogenic, cause other health issues, including effects on the reproductive and endocrine systems. 'As soon as you can eliminate one path of exposure, like drinking water, the better,' she said. Zeldin said the proposed changes to the PFAS rules would be introduced this fall and finalized next spring. The proposal is likely to be met with considerable opposition, Benesh said. 'There is already a significant amount of outrage among communities that have learned over the years their drinking water is contaminated,' she said. Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW
Los Angeles Times
12-05-2025
- Sport
- Los Angeles Times
Top seeds win beach volleyball titles at AVP Huntington Beach Open
Andy Benesh was simply in the zone. The Rancho Palos Verdes native had six blocks and four aces in the first set alone of Sunday's AVP Huntington Beach Open men's volleyball title match. He's 6-foot-8, but the play seemed even bigger. 'It's fun,' he said after the match. 'I got into a little bit of a flow state. Sometimes the plays seem like they're coming to you.' Top-seeded Benesh and partner Miles Partain cruised through to their second title in Huntington Beach, taking a 21-14, 21-14 decision over fellow 2024 Olympians Chase Budinger and Miles Evans, the No. 2 seeds, on the north side of the Huntington Beach Pier. The women's final was closer, but also featured the top seeds earning the hardware. Taryn Brasher and Kristen Nuss got past No. 3-seeded Terese Cannon and Megan Kraft, 21-17, 21-23, 15-9. Benesh and Partain, who advanced to the quarterfinals at the Paris Olympics, had previously won Huntington Beach in 2023. That was their first AVP victory together as a team, and this year's title represents their fourth as a team. Both the men's and women's champions received trophies shaped like a surfboard. 'I love the patriotism of Huntington Beach,' said Partain, from Pacific Palisades, who has had to recover after his family home burned down in the Palisades fire in January. 'American flags everywhere, I really love that about this place. It's always good competing here.' Benesh and Partain did not drop a set throughout the single-elimination tournament, earning a 21-14, 21-14 semifinal win over No. 12 Hagan Smith and Logan Webber. Benesh said their new coach, Theo Brunner, has preached aggressive play, specifically on his serves. It paid off for him and Partain on Mother's Day, and Benesh added that both of their moms were in attendance to watch the final. 'This surface plays to our advantage,' he said. 'It's a fast surface, and we like to play a fast game.' Brasher and Nuss, meanwhile, won their eighth title together, their first in Huntington Beach. The 2024 Olympians took down No. 4-seeded Fullerton native Kelly Cheng and her partner Molly Shaw 21-15, 21-17, in the semifinals earlier Sunday. They said they appreciated the vibes in the sold-out stadium court, as well as outside of it. 'We absolutely loved that people were building up the sand so that they could look over the fence, because there were no more tickets available,' Brasher said. 'We think that's amazing. There's just so much support for beach volleyball here.' They had three match points in the second set of the title match, but Cannon and Kraft were able to save each of them and force a third set. In the decider, however, Brasher and Nuss would not be denied, beating Cannon and Craft for the seventh time in eight career meetings. 'Before every single set, Taryn always says, 'It's zeroes, it's a new game,'' Nuss said. 'Whatever just happened is in the past, and this is a brand new game. I think that's how we go into every single set, regardless of who has momentum, just focusing on us and playing our game.' Benesh and Partain, Brasher and Nuss and several other top teams in Huntington Beach will move on to the 2025 AVP League season, which kicks off in Palm Beach, Fla. on the weekend of May 23-24. This is the second year for the eight-week AVP League, which returns to Southern California with a San Diego stop on June 6-7 and a Los Angeles stop on July 11-12. 'It's short games to 15, so it makes every point that much more important,' Brasher said. 'We're excited to keep growing the game. Hopefully people keep tuning in and following along.' The AVP's other Southern California stop this year will be the Manhattan Beach Open, set for Aug. 15-17. That event is not a league stop but considered a heritage event, like Huntington Beach.
New York Times
20-03-2025
- Automotive
- New York Times
Inside the design of the Mets' new road jerseys
James Benesh, the New York Mets' executive director of consumer products, knows how uniforms frame our memories of a baseball team's historical eras. He knows the Mets' best teams in the 1980s are inexorably tied to the racing stripes on their shoulders, the same way the 'Mojo Rising' teams at the turn of the century won their biggest games in black or that Matt Harvey's best starts all came in royal blue. Advertisement Benesh hopes he and his team have just designed the uniform you'll remember from this era of New York Mets baseball. When the Mets open the season with road series in Houston and Miami, they'll do so with two new road uniforms — a tweaked version of their traditional gray uniforms and a brand new blue alternate road jersey. They're the not entirely expected results of a trickle-down process that started years ago. This was a wholly different process than the one that created the Mets' City Connect jerseys last season. That was designing a uniform out of the ether to match a Nike prompt. The Mets' new road jerseys, on the other hand, are what happens when a series of smaller conversations snowball into something new. The first came while the Mets were soliciting player feedback in designing their City Connect jerseys, and they kept hearing about the need for a new road alternate. The Mets had scrapped their old blue alternates — with 'New York' in gray serifed print across the chest — after the 2021 season when they made the home black uniforms part of their rotation again. Teams are currently allowed four traditional jerseys plus a City Connect uniform. The idea for something new was planted. If the team was going to go with a road alternate, that probably meant bumping the home blue alternate — the one with 'Mets' in orange across the chest — out of the rotation. Although the home blues had been worn a lot in 2022 and 2023 (49 times combined, compared to 41 times over the previous five seasons), they'd been reduced to just five games last season, partly because of the introduction of the City Connect jerseys. And if the team was going to bump the home blue alternates, there was something else to consider. One of a team's four traditional jerseys has to be worn in spring training. Advertisement 'We had to have something that would be a comfortable design for spring as well,' Benesh said. 'Black wasn't going to work; we weren't going to do that for all of spring. We weren't going to do the pinstripes or the grays, so let's try a blue alternate for that.' The next conversation came with the club's equipment manager, Kevin Kierst, who pitched the idea of bolder striping on the team's jerseys. Rather than simple royal blue piping, Kierst wondered about blue stripes outlining an orange stripe — essentially, an inverted and narrowed version of the Mets' famous racing stripes of the 1980s. This inspired a design aesthetic, with the new striping on the jersey's sleeves, collar and the side of the pants. And the other discussion was around the script 'New York' used on the Mets' road gray uniforms in the 1987 season. 'In our opinion, that script had way too short of a lifetime,' Benesh said. '(It) comes from our history and is pretty identifiable with us — you see it and there's no question who it belongs to.' The Mets dipped their toes in by placing the 'New York' script on their road batting practice hats in 2024. The feedback was almost exclusively positive: Players liked it, members of the front office liked it, and fans liked it. Sales of the road BP hat easily outpaced sales of the home one, according to Benesh, though he conceded the home BP hat, with its thick striping across the front, catered to 'a more specific taste.' There was an added benefit to putting the 'New York' script on a jersey. Because it's oriented diagonally, as opposed to the arched style of the wordmark on the club's gray jerseys, the script works better on different kinds of merchandise. Furthermore, Major League Baseball's style guide partitions team logos into 'active' ones and historical ones called 'Cooperstown' logos. The Cooperstown logos can only be placed on certain kinds of merchandise, and so turning the 'New York' script into an active logo means it can go on just about anything the Mets want to sell. Advertisement There were still two bolder decisions to make. The first was to keep the 'New York' script in blue on a blue jersey, outlined only in orange (sometimes called 'stealth lettering'). Benesh actually viewed this non-traditional choice as creating a more subtle design, and he felt more comfortable with it when the team had ditched the white drop-shadow on its black jerseys ahead of the 2024 season — another move that threatened the legibility of the wordmark. 'We also need to make sure it's something fans are going to want. How can we cast the biggest net we can?' Benesh said. 'It's not a big, loud scream with additional colors in there, and we get to stay true to our team colors of blue and orange.' Other teams that initially used stealth lettering on alternate jerseys, like Atlanta and Miami, have eventually filled it in to make it more legible. (UniWatch mocked up what the Mets' jersey would look like with different colors for the lettering.) That wasn't right away, though: It took Atlanta 11 years and Miami five to make the change. Benesh doesn't think legibility will be a problem for the Mets. 'We'll probably stand pat barring some crazy feedback,' he said. 'If we're going to make a jersey change, you want it to be somewhat longstanding for the sake of the fan. That's a 10- or 20-year purchase for you.' The second bold decision was to make the jersey a pullover, rather than a button-up. After they were ubiquitous in the 1980s, the league largely abandoned pullovers by the early 1990s; the Mets had not worn a pullover jersey since 1990. The design team liked how a pullover tied into the jersey's sense of history. They'd already resurrected the 'New York' script and added a stripe reminiscent of their 1980s design; why not try the pullover here as well? And it didn't hurt that a pullover would allow that script wordmark full prominence. It wouldn't be bisected the way it would in a button-up jersey. Advertisement 'We haven't had it in a very long time, it's an alternate and not a primary, so let's throw it all at it and see if it comes together,' Benesh said. 'Feedback has been awesome. Everyone seems to really like it so far.' The final piece of the puzzle was something the Mets didn't even consider at the start of the process: Should they tinker with their traditional road gray jerseys as well? Because of the different striping pattern, the new blue alternates would have to be worn with a second set of gray pants — unless the Mets used the thicker stripe on the gray jerseys, as well. Players had previously suggested removing the blue piping down the front of the jersey, and Benesh thought the subsequent loss of color there could be mitigated by bolder stripes around the collar. They ordered a sample jersey, doubtful they'd actually want to make the switch. 'We wanted to see it in person,' said Benesh, adding there was trepidation about tweaking a beloved, classic uniform at all. 'When we got the sample in, it was 'Oh my, we might like the gray even better.' We were thrilled that we could now roll out the cohesive road look.' You'll see plenty of those road uniforms right away. The Mets have worn the blue alternates throughout the spring, and they open the regular season with 12 of their first 18 games away from home. Benesh hopes you see them deep into October, as well, and for years down the road when you think of these Mets. 'It's good to look at our history and say, 'Those are the guys that were in these,'' he said. 'These two jerseys now get to be a part of what these next few years bring.' (Top photo of Mark Vientos and Jose Siri: Courtesy / New York Mets)
Chicago Tribune
17-03-2025
- Sport
- Chicago Tribune
Charlie Benesh is an accomplished cellist. But her pitching is music to the ears for ‘lucky' Metea Valley too.
Metea Valley senior pitcher Charlie Benesh inherited a love of music from her parents. Benesh's father, Edward, was a percussionist, and her mother, Steph, was a violinist when they were in high school. Benesh's instrument of choice is the cello, which she began playing in sixth grade. She plays it in the chamber strings, the highest-level orchestra at Metea Valley. 'I really like the sound,' Benesh said. 'It's such a wholesome sound. It sounds very rich compared to a lot of other instruments that I've heard.' Metea Valley senior catcher Sydney Eakin knows all about creating good sounds. She plays the alto saxophone in the school band and has been accepted into the marching band at Wisconsin-Eau Claire. But one of Eakin's favorite sounds is the pop that Benesh's pitches make when they land in her mitt. 'I've caught her all four years, and I've just seen her grow as a pitcher throughout those,' Eakin said. 'She battled through some injuries sophomore year, and she's gained back the speed and has a good mix of pitches to keep batters on their toes. We have a lot to work with.' Indeed, Benesh is primed to be better than ever as she enters her third varsity season. The Salem State commit posted a 15-7 record and a 3.58 ERA with 90 strikeouts in 128 innings last season, when the Mustangs (16-13, 11-4) won the DuPage Valley Conference regular-season and conference tournament titles. 'She keeps us in every game just with her competitiveness, and all her stuff is really good,' Metea Valley coach Michaela Paprota said. 'We can rely on her not only on the field, but she makes us better here in practice, which is awesome. 'I tell my girls, 'You are lucky. You get to practice off of her and get the reps off of her and get better, but then you don't have to face her in a game.' It's a win-win for us.' Benesh has a history of winning big games. As a sophomore, she threw a shutout as the Mustangs upset Naperville North in the Class 4A regional semifinals. Last season, Benesh won both games in the DVC Tournament. 'I like pitching under pressure,' she said. 'It helps me get the adrenaline running, and I feel like it's high-energy, high-stakes, and it keeps our team high-energy.' Benesh gets her pitching ability and affinity for pressure from her father, who pitched in the minor leagues for the Tampa Bay Rays after he graduated from South Carolina. It has allowed her to balance her commitments to music and sports. 'It's a lot of discipline and individual work that we have to do to maintain expectations,' Benesh said of orchestra. 'We play four or five concerts a year. 'I try to focus on softball when I'm here at practice, and then I obviously do my individual work at home. Then we practice every day in school because it is a class. It balances itself out.' Benesh does both activities while maintaining a 4.2 GPA. She and Eakin are three-time academic all-conference honorees and feel their musical and athletic talents mesh well. 'We have a good connection, as any pitcher and catcher should have,' Eakin said. 'We know what each other wants, and I feel like over the four years I've really been able to build up that connection. 'If something is off, we're a good team to work it out. If one at-bat goes wrong, we're able to bounce right back.' The Mustangs are hoping to repeat their success from last season in the conference and hope it carries over into the playoffs, while Benesh figures to graduate as one of the top pitchers in Metea Valley history. She needs five wins to become the program's all-time leader and ranks second in career strikeouts and ERA. 'I hope we'll pick up right where we left off last season,' Eakin said. 'She's only made improvements since then. I feel like we're going to be a force to be reckoned with. Everyone is going to want to come after us, and that's mainly because of her and her pitching.' Benesh has not decided whether she will continue playing the cello in college, saying softball will be her main priority. But she's comfortable performing in the limelight in both orchestra and softball. 'Music and sports, you're working with a team,' she said. 'Both have an audience, so it kind of goes hand in hand.'
