Any organization granted a tax exemption for “social welfare” activity under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code can collect unlimited and undisclosed contributions but if the group is spending most of its money on political activity, then it loses its status and has to report how much it got and from whom, according to tax experts.

Last Friday, the FBI revealed that the IRS was focusing on conservative groups for further review of their tax-exempt status. News reports first said the targeting was done by IRS agents in the Cincinnati office trying to cope with a flood of applications for 501(c)(4) exemptions. It turned out that on June 29, 2011, Lois Lerner, head of the IRS division overseeing tax-exempt groups, had learned of the targeting and insisted that the search be broadened to all political and lobbying groups, but, according to the New York Times, the IRS branch employees kept it narrow.

The revelation provoked Obama to say at a press conference last Friday, “If you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and nonpartisan way, then that is outrageous. It is contrary to our traditions.” He said that “people have to be held accountable, and it’s got to be fixed.”

Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that the FBI is “coordinating with the Justice Department to see if any laws were broken in connection with those matters related to the IRS.”

On Monday, two Senate committees, both run by Democrats, announced they’d hold investigations while House committees run by Republicans have vowed to do the same.

“The IRS’s actions are disgraceful, and [it] attacks the very heart of our democracy,” Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) said in a statement. “It warrants a full congressional and criminal investigation.”

Rep. Steve Israel (D-Huntington) echoed his outrage. “I’m deeply disturbed by reports that the IRS targeted certain groups,” he said in a statement. “I’m eager to review the Inspector General’s report later this week. If some at the IRS took actions that were politically motivated, they must be held accountable, along with those at the highest levels of the agency. We must make sure that the IRS maintains its integrity as an impartial agency.”

In the 2012 election, Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) was in the crosshairs of millions of dollars spent in negative advertising by Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt group. The advertising never mentioned Bishop’s Republican opponent, Randy Altschuler, but painted the five-term LI  congressman as a scoundrel embodying “everything that’s wrong with Washington.”

Rather than comment on what it felt like to be outspent by a 501(c)(4), Bishop expressed his concern about the IRS’ apparently politically motivated audits.

“I am deeply troubled by reports that some IRS employees applied undue scrutiny to certain groups seeking  tax-exempt status,” said Bishop in a statement. “The enforcement authority of the IRS was designed to operate independently of this kind of political pressure. I expect the report to be issued this week by Treasury Department’s Inspector General will be the basis for immediate action and strong, comprehensive measures to ensure fairness and impartiality at the IRS.”

John Gomez, who ran against Israel in 2010 on the Republican and Conservative lines, had the full support of Long Island’s Tea Party, he said. But he had an uphill battle trying to level the playing field financially.

“Steve Israel was sitting on $4 million—I had $50,000,” Gomez recalled. By the election, he said he’d raised about half a million dollars and had to respond to letters from the Federal Election Commission charging him with campaign fund-raising violations that he later overturned in court. He likens what he went through with the FEC to what Tea Party groups faced with the IRS audits.

“Strategically, it’s a way to slow these organizations down,” Gomez says. “You can’t spend time organizing and disseminating information because this is really what your purpose is: to make people aware that the government is out of control.”

Steve Flanagan, director of the Conservative Society for Action, one of the first Tea Party groups founded on LI more than four years ago, shared Gomez’s concern. “If any of these allegations are true, we’re talking about a serious abuse of power here,” he said.

Before the news broke about the IRS audits, the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, based in Washington, DC, sent out an urgent fund-raising request to its supporters past and present. One recipient was an 89-year-old woman who provided this reporter with her mailing. Among its calls to “provide critical financial and tactical support to principled conservative candidates at every level,” it said: “We can’t stand by and allow Obama, the Democrats and so-called ‘moderate’ Republicans to transform the United States into a weak, dependent, second-rate nation.”

From the wording above, it’s hard to say that this group is engaged in purely “social welfare.” But that’s what the tax-exempt battle apparently is about.

From a historical perspective, the White House has used the IRS to political ends for decades, starting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who employed it against Sen. Huey Long (D-La.) and Rep. Hamilton Fish, a New York congressman. During the Eisenhower administration, the IRS gave the FBI the tax returns of key members of the American Communist Party.

President Richard Nixon had the IRS audit muck-raking reporters who were critical of him, such as Newsday’s Bob Greene. And President Ronald Reagan used the IRS to challenge the tax-exempt status of the non-profit Mother Jones magazine, forcing one of the leading left-wing publications in the country to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend itself. It won.

Congresswoman Pelosi commemorates the LGBT victims of the Holocaust at the “Friends of the Pink Triangle” ceremony at the Twin Peaks Vista Overlook, Calif. (Courtesy of Nancy Pelosi’s office).

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic minority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, is accepting an award from the Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth at the nonprofit group’s 20th Anniversary Gala on Friday evening.

Also being honored are Edie Windsor, whose lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in March, and Andrew Stern, the chief operating officer of NARAL Pro-Choice NY.

“We are thrilled to be honoring Congresswoman Pelosi for her decades of heroic leadership and advocacy on behalf of the GLBT community and people living with HIV/AIDS,” said David Kilmnick, chief executive officer of LIGALY. “This year’s honorees represent some of the most important voices in the movement for GLBT equality.”

Pelosi’s district office is in San Francisco, a leading city in the modern gay rights movement and the first in then nation to elect an openly gay politician—Bay Shore native Harvey Milk.

Pelosi, Windsor and Stern will receive the honors before a crowd of more than 400 local civic, political and business leaders at Carlyle on the Green at Bethpage State Park.

Democratic members of LI’s congressional delegation—including Reps. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) and Carolyn McCarthy (D-Mineola)—will be on hand to show their leader around.

Robert Cleva shows off his Crasche Middie women’s lacrosse helmet.

Many years ago, Robert Cleva, who runs a commercial real estate business in Woodbury, fell off his bike, landed on the grass and hit his head. An avid exercise enthusiast, he got back on his bike the next day and wore a baseball batting helmet. Dissatisfied with other bike helmets and unhappy with his fallback version, he came up with his own design, eventually patenting a product for bikers, skiers and skateboarders—even police officers.

“People who don’t want to look like they’re wearing a helmet but want to have protection are our clients,” says Cleva, whose online head gear company is called Crasche New York. Last year they began marketing the Crasche Hat, which looks like a woolen ski cap (it’s actually 100 percent Acrylic) but has hidden “impact-resistant protective inserts” made out of polycarbonate plastic and padded with neoprene rubber and air chambers to cushion the shock.

Cleva noticed that parents were buying the Crasche Hat for their daughters playing lacrosse—especially if the girls had suffered concussions—and that surprised him. He had it tested to determine its effectiveness against the impacts of lacrosse sticks and balls to the player’s head.

“It turned out to be a very good product for stick to head but it was marginal for ball to head,” Cleva says.

In February 2012 he’d submitted the hat model to US Lacrosse (USL), the sport’s national governing body, based in Baltimore, where the first women’s lacrosse team played in the United States in 1926. The league itself has been debating how to address the concussion issue—a debate that Cleva inadvertently got caught up in. At first, he got an encouraging reply from Melissa Coyne, the women’s game director at USL.

“Your product complies with current USL rules for women’s lacrosse,” Coyne emailed Cleva in March 2012. “Hope that helps!”

But with the test results in hand, Cleva decided to redesign his product so it could withstand a ball speeding to the head at 78 mph and reduce the impact below the concussive level.

“We re-engineered it, and informed US Lacrosse that we’d made some changes,” Cleva says. “We opened it up—took the top off—because the girls didn’t want the skull cap, they wanted their hair [coming] out the top.”

He named the new model the Crasche Middie, after a lacrosse position. It resembled a head band, available in red, white, black, navy blue or light blue.

“It’s designed to rest on the head,” Cleva explains. “It’s attached to the goggles. When you pull the goggles down, it goes back with it.”

He’s most proud of the material used in the new headgear’s inserts. “You could hit the thing with a sledge hammer and you can’t crack it,” he says.

At this year’s January national lacrosse convention in Philadelphia, Cleva set up a booth featuring the Crashe Middies underneath a big banner proclaiming, “The future of headgear in girls lacrosse.” The future was short-lived, however. USL officials shut him down and escorted him out of the building. Cleva thought USL’s previous approval of the Crasche Hat extended to the Crasche Middie. He was mistaken, they informed him. He would have to submit his new design for approval.

“It happened to be seen by one of our rules committee members who brought up the fact that this product was different from the one that we had approved and this had not been approved,” Coyne tells the Press. “It’s significantly different!” She added that the Crasche Middie brochure “made some pretty incredible claims of its protective value, and that concerned some members of our organization, specifically our sports, science and safety committee…”

After Cleva submitted his new headgear for their examination, the USL’s rules subcommittee determined that the product was “deemed illegal for play.”  In their email to him, they said it violated “portions of Rule 2” regarding “Soft Head Gear…defined as any head covering without hard or unyielding parts that have the potential to injure another player. The product, Crasche Middie, contains hard inserts that are not unyielding which could possibly pose a danger to other players. Additionally, those inserts which [sic] are not adequately padded or appropriately secured and can be easily dislodged. They could potentially injure the player wearing the product or another player.”

Cleva was infuriated by USL’s response and wrote Coyne the following: “To claim that the inserts can come loose is patently false. To claim that they become a danger to other players is ridiculous.”

He sent them an impact test from ICS Laboratories in Ohio, which he’d paid for, claiming it showed that not only did his headgear pose no threat to another player it actually reduced the force of two players knocking heads if one wore the Crasche Middie and the other girl didn’t. USL’s Coyne was not persuaded.

“Parents are looking for protective headgear. We understand that,” says Coyne. “But we as a governing body also have a responsibility to make sure that consumers are protected.”

Coyne told Cleva that US Lacrosse is working closely with ASTM International, a nonprofit organization based in Pennsylvania formerly known as the American Society for Testing and Materials, to create a women’s lacrosse headgear standard. She suggested his company become a member. Cleva says joining would cost only $75, but he’s concerned that the terms of the membership could impinge on his patent rights. He is having his lawyer look into that issue before he signs up. Without a doubt, he insists, “My product will be the standard because it’s so effective.”

Of more immediate concern, he says, is that one of ASTM’s current members told him that setting standards could take two years at least. Any delay is hard for Cleva to take.

“How many girls who are denied the use of the Crasche Middie will subsequently suffer a preventable head injury?” Cleva wrote Coyne back in February after she suggested he wait until USL’s committee meeting in June.

The answer is that nobody knows.

A researcher at George Mason University, Shane Caswell, partnered with two members of USL’s sports science and safety committee to examine head injury incidents reported during 2008 and 2009 involving high school girls’ lacrosse players between the ages of 14 and 18 years old. Their study came out in February 2012. Gathering data from 529 varsity and junior varsity games, they found 21 concussions. Most of these injuries resulted from stick-to-head contact in front of the goal.

Coyne says that USL is constantly monitoring national research on the occurrence of concussions in the sport. “I don’t necessarily see that we’ve had this huge jump in the actual injury,” she says. “I think the actual diagnosis has been what’s changed.”

The girls’ game is intended to be safer than the boys’ game, says Stephanie Degennaro, who manages the Lacrosse Unlimited store in Miller Place. She played varsity lacrosse at Longwood High School in Brookhaven and at Stony Brook University. When she’s not selling merchandise for “the fastest sport on two feet,” she’s coaching and refereeing girls’ games.

“Basically women’s lacrosse is supposed to be a non-contact sport,” she says. “Everything is supposed to be finesse and controlled… Men’s lacrosse is a contact sport like football.”

Degennaro’s store does not carry headgear for girls, but she has noticed players wearing “these headband things” and “those soft foam ‘ugly’ helmets” on the field.

“Approving headgear is going to make the girls’ game more violent,” she says. “To be completely honest, I wouldn’t want to see the game go that way. Some of the girls out there wearing these helmets act as if they’re invincible. I would only want to give [headgear] to girls who’ve had prior concussions.”

One of those girls playing lacrosse with a concussion is Cindy Dreher’s 10-year-old daughter, Darby, who picked up the sport after watching her two older brothers play. The Babylon Village mother bought her a Crasche Middie because she had gotten a concussion from a serious horse-back riding accident last year.

“My daughter has dark hair so you don’t even notice she’s wearing it out there,” Dreher tells the Press. “It looks like a band for sweat. It doesn’t look like a helmet at all.”

Dreher had looked for a long time before she found Cleva’s product online.

“I had to do some research because what’s available for girls right now is this ridiculously stupid, soft helmet that doesn’t protect at all,” Dreher says. “They say it’s a ‘non-aggressive game’ but I don’t care because it’s got a stick and a ball, and those girls are very capable of hitting each other pretty hard with it…”

Lacrosse Unlimited’s Hauppauge store manager, Jason Sweet, a high school and college lax (lacrosse) player who still plays, thinks that giving girls’ more protection will change their game. “They might as well get gloves, too, and go out there and beat each other up like we do!” laughs Sweet, who’s had three concussions himself, but none since he started wearing a $234 helmet. By comparison, the Crasche Middie retails for under $30.

“I would say that most parents want headgear [for girls],” Sweet says, “Most players don’t.”

Cleva thinks one obstacle facing his product’s approval is growing tension within girls’ lacrosse about the future of the game.

“You have one camp that says, ‘Let’s put helmets on and protect the girls, and become like a boys’ sport. If it’s rough and tumble, who cares?’” Cleva explains. “The other side is saying: ‘That’s the worst thing. We don’t want the game to change. Leave it alone.’ US Lacrosse is in the ‘leave-it-alone’ camp. This is a big controversy, and I’ve kind of fallen into the middle of it.”

As of now only goalies in girls lacrosse are permitted to wear hard helmets. Goggles were mandated for all female players in 2004—New York State reportedly led this initiative—but now USL is considering whether the eyewear standards should be revised. “We’re taking a good look at that,” Coyne says.

Last week, Cleva got his hopes up when a USL official asked him to send his headgear to the rules committee at the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Then he learned that the USL’s own subcommittee, scheduled to convene this month, had tabled discussion of his headgear until June “when they can get the entire rules committee together,” Cleva says.

“Mr. Cleva has been told on several occasions that if he adjusts his product to fit the two elements that we wanted fixed – if he makes those adjustments—we are happy to look at his product again,” says Coyne. “But he has to address them just like anyone else. He’s not the first person to be rejected.”

Cleva has demonstrated the headgear’s ability to hang onto its inserts to Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) and to an aide in the office of Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford). He doesn’t believe USL is giving his product a fair shake.

“They’re saying it can come out and it can’t come out!” Cleva exclaims. Given the opportunity, this reporter shook the Middie as hard as possible for almost a minute and finally an insert dislodged when the head gear was hurled against the floor.

“When a 10-year-old comes to your office and her mother is terrified that the girl’s going to get hurt, it’s the human element that’s overpowering,” Cleva says. “We think we offer a very reasonable product that is going to offer impact protection and give some peace of mind to people and these people won’t let your daughter buy it.”

President Barack Obama gave his first State of the Union address of his second term Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2013.

President Barack Obama laid out more than a dozen new initiatives Tuesday in the first State of the Union address of his second term, packing an array of issues into the hour-long speech, including four—climate change, immigration, veterans and gun control—of particular importantance to Long Islanders, a few of whom were in the audience.

Obama started off flat while discussing his budget and tax reform proposals, but he worked his way up to an emotional plea for Congress to enact new restrictions on firearms sales to reduce the number of gun deaths nationwide. He sounded encouraged by current immigration reform talks among lawmakers, but the president oscilated between urging the Republican leaders in the House of Representatives to negotiate a compromise on the upcoming deficit reduction plan known as sequestration, and threatening to use executive orders if Congress doesn’t act on global warming.

“We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen, were all just a freak coincidence,” Obama said, referring in part to the Oct. 29 hurricane-nor’easter hybrid that ravaged LI and the Northeast. ”Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science—and act before it’s too late.”

The president remained vague on most of his proposals, choosing to paint a broad picture of the goals he’s setting for the year to come, but did get into some specifics while discussing immigration and, to a lesser degree, gun control.

“Senators of both parties are working together on tough new laws to prevent anyone from buying guns for resale to criminals,” the president said, before rallying for a vote on the bill. ”Police chiefs are asking our help to get weapons of war and massive ammunition magazines off our streets, because these police chiefs, they’re tired of seeing their guys and gals being outgunned.”

Among those top cops was John Aresta, the Malverne village police chief, whose uncle was among six murdered in the 1993 Long Island Rail Road massacre. He was invited to attend by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-Mineola), whose husband was killed and son injured in the same shooting spree that launched her to the national stage to advocate for gun control.

“I personally don’t see a reason why anybody would need a 30-round clip or a 10-round clip for an assault rifle,” Aresta had told Fox Business News  last month shortly after New York State passed sweeping new gun control laws in the wake of the Newtown elementary school massacre in December.

Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford), the lone Republican among LI’s five-member Congressional delegation, wrote on Twitter that he was disapointed in Obama’s lack of focus on unemployment and deficit reduction, but co-authored an op-ed in Politico expressing support for ensuring background checks for all  gun purchases, with the exception of gifts between family members or temporary transfers for hunters. He noted national estimates that only four in 10 gun buyers are subject to such checks.

New York City got two mentions. Obama first touted the heroic nurses who evacuated newborn babies from the NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan during Sandy, signaling Menchu Sanchez by name. She was seated next to First Lady Michelle Obama. He later extolled the benefits of P-Tech in Brooklyn, a collaboration between New York Public Schools, the City University of New York and IBM, where students graduate with a high school diploma and an associate’s degree in computers or engineering—a model he wants emulated nationwide.

The emphasis on improving education to better the economy dovetailed with his reasons for supporting immigration, a hotly debated issue on LI, where undocumented Hispanic immigrant day laborers have repeatedly been victims of Suffolk County hate crimes in recent years.

“Our economy is stronger when we harness the talents and ingenuity of striving, hopeful immigrants,” Obama said, emphasizing that reform must include stronger border security, cutting waiting periods, attracting highly skilled engineers and ”establishing a responsible pathway to earned citizenship—a path that includes passing a background check, paying taxes and … learning English.”

But some immigration issues are easier to solve than others. Rep. Steve Israel (D-Dix Hills) invited as his guests Dania and Nick Marvos, a Little Neck couple who were in the process of adopting a 1-year-old boy named Ari from Russia until two months ago when Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning American adoptions of Russian children. The move was widely seen as retaliation for a recently passed U.S. law punishing Russian human rights violators.

“Waiting for news to see if we will be allowed to bring our baby home has been one of the most trying times in our lives,” Dania Mavros said in a statement released by Israel’s office. ”Devastating does not capture the emotional roller coaster that we are enduring every day.”

Congressman Israel said he is negotiating to help the couple complete the adoption process despite the new Russian law in an attempt to save their son-to-be from growing up in an orphanage. Thousands of other cases are also in jeopardy.

Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) invited Dina McKenna of Lindenhurst, whose husband, Sgt. William McKenna, died in 2010 of cancer caused by his exposure to toxic fumes from burn pits the military used for disposing of hazardous waste in Iraq. Bishop had laws passed to curtail the use of burn pits and require the Department of Veterans Affairs to improve its treatment of soldiers exposed to them.

“All veterans whose health may have been affected by toxic burn pits must be accounted for and given the health care and support they have earned,” Bishop said in a statement.

Obama’s nod to veterans came as he promised to better defend against cyber attacks, end the more than decade-long war in Afghanistan “by the end of next year,” prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons and isolate North Korea for its provocations in testing nuclear weapons potentially capable of being fitted on inter-continental ballistic missles. He reiterated plans to strengthen U.S. missle defense to block such an attack.

The commander-in-chief also made clear that while the military will not be sending large numbers of troops abroad for Iraq-style occupations, he vaguely referred to special operations forces that will continue to hunt al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and wherever else they may be hiding. He made veiled reference to the continued deployment of predator drones despite recently renewed controversy over their use to kill American citizens working with terrorists, such as Westbury-native Samir Khan, the al-Qaeda propagandist killed in U.S. airstrikes alongside militant cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.

“Where necessary, through a range of capabilities, we will continue to take direct action against those terrorists who pose the gravest threat to Americans,” he said.

Inside the workings of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

Physicists exploring the subatomic realm are well aware of the uncertainty principle at work on the particles there but now a federal report has come out that casts the future of America’s most advanced physics experiments in doubt at the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

The issue, as it is with many things involving the federal government these days, involves funding. But more importantly what’s at stake is the United States’ ability to remain at the forefront of cutting-edge science.

Last week a report was released by a subpanel of the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation’s Nuclear Science Advisory Committee that recommended closing the heavy ion collider if federal funding remains flat or just keeps up with inflation in the coming years. The report, named after the subpanel’s chairman Robert Tribble, a nuclear physicist based at the Cyclotron Institute at Texas A&M University, favored completing a facility now under construction at Michigan State University and maintaining another facility at the Jefferson Lab in Virginia, which is being upgraded.

A modest increase more than inflation, the report suggested, might keep all facilities at least on track. Of America’s the three large atomic research labs, only BNL’s RHIC is currently operating, and it is set to run a series of high-level experiments starting Feb. 11 that will last until the summer.

In Monday’s response to the report’s worst-case scenario, the Empire State’s Congressional representatives have begun to weigh in. Both New York’s Democratic Senators, Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, have called on the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Energy to increase funding of its nuclear physics program by an additional $50 million for the next fiscal year.

“Even though this report is non-binding, it should serve as a call to arms for those who care about scientific research, Long Island’s economy, and our nation’s position at the forefront of innovation,” said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY).  “The solution to the problem is simply to make sure that the budget for nuclear research in this country is given a modest boost, so that hundreds of jobs on Long Island are preserved and America remains at the cutting edge of nuclear research.  Cutting our nuclear research now, and ceding our advantage to our competitors, is penny wise and pound foolish.”

“Closing a facility that plays an important role in the future of U.S. competitiveness and supports hundreds of jobs is the wrong approach,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). “If we are going to out-innovate and out-compete other countries in the fields of science and technology, we must continue to invest in cutting edge facilities like the country’s only ion collider at Brookhaven National Lab.”

In a jointly authored letter to the outgoing Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and acting director of the Office of Management and Budget Jeffrey Zients, the senators wrote: “Now is not the time to scale back federal funding for such critical basic research and important scientific facilities and cede our position of leadership in these fields of study.  Our economic competitors in China, India and other countries have seen our success in these areas and now copy our approach to innovation and are increasing their rate of investment at a time when we seem to be considering the opposite.

“Strengthening U.S. investment in nuclear physics is the right thing to do to develop technologies to improve national security, identify and cure disease and meet our energy challenges, as well as to expand our knowledge about the makeup of the universe through scientific discovery.  Americans stand to benefit today and in the future from U.S. investment in nuclear physics through better medical imaging and diagnostic tools, new cancer therapies, advanced tools to deter nuclear proliferation and innovative energy storage systems.”

Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) has been working closely with the offices of both senators to coordinate a response, and together they reversed deep cuts Republicans in Congress had proposed in spending bills in the past. They hope to do the same this time around, too.

“I have fought successfully in the past to protect Brookhaven National Lab from damaging budget cuts that would hurt Long Island’s economy and threaten America’s international leadership in research and development,” said Rep. Tim Bishop. “I am coordinating closely with Lab officials and Senators Schumer and Gillibrand to make the case that the cutting-edge research in energy, medicine and other fields performed at the RHIC is a national priority that deserves sustained funding.”

The RHIC is world-renown for its ability to recreate the conditions presumed to match the universe in the first moments of existence so scientists can study in detail the type of matter at the beginning and understand the force that holds together “the fundamental particles that make up 99 percent” of the visible world—from stars to planets to people.

“We believe that RHIC science, past and future, is compelling and essential both for the DOE mission as well as for U.S. leadership in nuclear physics — and the Tribble report strongly reflects that view,” says Doon Gibbs, BNL’s interim laboratory director. “We will continue to advocate for science, for RHIC, and for Brookhaven Lab in all that we do.”

In a statement on the lab’s website, Gibbs said that he’s been in touch with the other two labs’ directors and “we have agreed to work together to realize the modest growth path.”