Aurelia Butler

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    NYT Crossword Answers for Dec. 13, 2024

    Ryan Patrick Smith’s crossword put up quite a fight, but there is always a way to win.FRIDAY PUZZLE — Welcome to First Pass Friday, an occasional Wordplay column in which I show you my first few passes through the clue list. This serves two purposes: It provides encouragement for those who are just starting to solve the harder, end-of-the-week puzzles, and it proves to those who have finished the crossword that they are much smarter than I am.I kid, of course — you’re all smarter than I am — but I really did struggle with Ryan Patrick Smith’s clever puzzle. It could have been for any number of reasons: Maybe I wasn’t fully caffeinated when I solved, or perhaps the clues and entries were outside my wheelhouse. But writing in that first correct entry when you’ve been staring woefully at the opaque clues and the blank grid goes a long way toward inspiring solvers to hang in there. It’s a rush, and that rush pushes me to build on that success.And that, in a nutshell, is how you solve a tough puzzle. I once attended a yoga workshop where the instructor said that there were only two steps to a fruitful practice: 1) Start, and 2) continue. It’s good advice for just about any aspect of life.But if you’re still interested, I’ll walk you through my first couple of attempts at Mr. Smith’s puzzle. Please note that there will be multiple spoilers after the jump. If you don’t wish to see them, avert your eyes and scroll down to Mr. Smith’s notes on his puzzle.Deb AmlenWe 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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    A Bagel Shop Closes, and the Upper West Side Is Absolutely Losing It

    The neighborhood reaction to the sudden, mysterious closure of a Manhattan bagel shop was intense: “No no no no no no no no no no no!!”In the vast constellation of New York City bagel shops, Absolute Bagels on the Upper West Side has held a lofty but unusual position of honor.Famous among bagel aficionados as a keeper of the flame lit by the original bagel makers of the Lower East Side — hand-rolled, kettle-boiled, oven-baked, always fresh — the shop was founded in the early 1990s by Samak Thongkrieng, a Thai immigrant who learned his craft at the venerable Ess-a-Bagel.Even as the nondescript storefront became an unlikely TikTok destination, Absolute Bagels kept no social media presence of its own, had no website, did not deliver and accepted only cash.But as anyone could see from the lines up and down the block on the weekends, Absolute was among the most popular bagel places in New York.Then, on Thursday morning, tragedy. A piece of paper haphazardly stuck to the door with packing tape spelled out the sad news in bright red letters: “WE ARE CLOSED.”And lo did a cry of anguish rise from a stretch of Broadway between West 107th and 108th. It spread quickly to West Side Rag, the local news site that broke the bombshell news on Thursday morning, and then downtown, on to Brooklyn, to New Jersey, and to bagel lovers everywhere.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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    Mount Vernon Police’s Strip Searches Were Unconstitutional, U.S. Says

    A report by federal prosecutors found that a Westchester County police department violated the Fourth Amendment “on an enormous scale.”Two women, 65 and 75 years old, were taken to a police station in Mount Vernon, N.Y., after a traffic stop in 2020. Officers instructed both women to undress. Then they were told to bend over and cough.Neither woman was arrested, and an investigation determined there had been no basis for the traffic stop in the first place. One of the women said she had been left “very humiliated” and “on the verge of fainting” from fear after the invasive search, commonly used in drug arrests.The encounter is just one example of a long-running pattern of improper strip searches conducted by the police department in Mount Vernon, in Westchester County, according to a report released Thursday by the Department of Justice and the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.In the 34-page report, investigators outlined “significant systemic deficiencies” at the very core of the police department that they said had resulted in unnecessarily violent encounters and improper arrests. The report also raised “serious concerns about discriminatory policing in predominantly Black neighborhoods,” according to a statement from the Department of Justice.According to the report, “highly intrusive” strip searches and cavity searches were “deeply ingrained” standard practices in the department. Investigators said that the department had acknowledged that officers performed strip searches on everyone they arrested until at least October 2022, a practice that the report said amounted to a “gross violation of the Fourth Amendment on an enormous scale.”Sometimes, these searches occurred before people were even arrested and were performed even when an officer had no reason to believe the person had drugs or other contraband, according to the report. Several people told investigators that officers had searched them repeatedly even when they had been in custody and under police observation “at all times” between the searches.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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    Amazon Plans $1 Million Donation to Trump’s Inaugural Fund

    Amazon said on Thursday that it was planning to donate $1 million to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inaugural fund, part of a pattern in which tech companies and their leaders are taking steps to repair their relationships with Mr. Trump.Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said on Wednesday that it was putting $1 million into the inaugural fund, just weeks after Mr. Zuckerberg met with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago.Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, have had a rocky history with Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump had long harbored frustration with Mr. Bezos over reporting in The Washington Post. During his first administration, Mr. Trump had also questioned whether the U.S. Postal Service gave Amazon a sweetheart deal, and Amazon accused Mr. Trump of improperly pressuring the Pentagon to deny the company a major cloud computing contract.But over the summer, Mr. Bezos spoke with Mr. Trump after the former president was shot at a campaign event, and on social media he praised Mr. Trump’s “grace and courage under literal fire.” More recently, Mr. Bezos has said that he is “very optimistic” about the incoming Trump administration.At the DealBook Summit in New York on Dec. 4, Mr. Bezos said that Mr. Trump “seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. And my point of view is, if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him, because we do have too much regulation in this country.”Amazon also said it would livestream the inauguration next month, as it has done with previous inaugurations. The donation was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal.Mr. Trump said on Thursday that Mr. Bezos, who chairs Amazon’s board, was meeting him next week. Mr. Trump said he wanted to get ideas from Mr. Bezos and other tech leaders.Gifts to inaugural committees, which do not have contribution limits, are popular among businesses and individuals eager to curry favor with an incoming administration. Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee is offering top-tier benefits to donors who contribute $1 million.Amazon gave $57,746 to Mr. Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks political donations. The company said the Biden campaign did not accept donations from tech companies in 2020. More

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    U.S. Charges Ex-Syrian Prison Official With Torture

    The indictment was the second time in a week that the Justice Department announced that it had charged top Syrian officials with human rights abuses.A federal grand jury in Los Angeles charged a former Syrian government official on Thursday with torturing political dissidents at a notorious prison in Damascus.The former official, Samir Ousman al-Sheikh, 72, ran Adra prison, according to federal prosecutors, where he was personally involved in torturing inmates in a bid to stifle opposition to its recently deposed authoritarian president, Bashar al-Assad.Prosecutors said Mr. al-Sheikh ordered prisoners to be taken to a part of the prison known as the “punishment wing,” where they were beaten while hanging from the ceiling. Guards would forcibly fold bodies in half, resulting in terrible pain and fractured spines.The indictment was the second time in a week that the Justice Department announced that it had charged top Syrian officials with human rights abuses. The moves underscore its efforts to hold to account the top reaches of the government for a brutal system of detention and torture that flourished under Mr. al-Assad.The charges against Mr. al-Sheikh on Thursday add to earlier charges in July that accused him of attempted naturalization fraud in his effort to seek U.S. citizenship, according to a criminal complaint. He was arrested attempting to fly to Beirut.The U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, Martin Estrada, cast the new charges against Mr. al-Sheikh in a grim light. “The allegations in this superseding indictment of grave human rights abuses are chilling,” he said.Mr. al-Sheikh was charged with three counts of torture and one count of conspiracy to commit torture.Mr. al-Sheikh immigrated to the United States in 2020 and applied for U.S. citizenship in 2023, lying on federal forms about the abuses, the authorities have said.Prosecutors said he was appointed governor of the province of Deir al-Zour by Mr. al-Assad in 2011. Mr. al-Assad’s authoritarian government crumbled over the weekend after rebels routed his forces and took control of swaths of the country.On Monday, federal prosecutors unsealed charges against two top-ranking Syrian intelligence officials, accusing them of war crimes. The pair, Jamil Hassan and Abdul Salam Mahmoud, oversaw a prison in Damascus during the Syrian civil war, prosecutors said.That indictment signaled the first time the United States had criminally charged top Syrian officials with human rights abuses used to silence dissent and spread fear through the country.Mr. Hassan was the head of the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, and Mr. Mahmoud served as a brigadier general in the Air Force’s intelligence unit. Their location is unknown. More

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    Humpback Whale Sets Record for How Far It Traveled

    The adult male swam more than 8,000 miles from South America to Africa, most likely in search of a mate, researchers said.A humpback whale set a record by traversing at least three oceans and more than 8,000 miles — most likely in search of a mate, according to a new study.A team of scientists identified the adult male, which swam 8,106 miles from breeding grounds in Colombia in South America to breeding grounds in Zanzibar in Africa from 2013 to 2022.The unusual odyssey is the longest recorded distance traveled by the species and is the subject of a study published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, potentially providing new insights into the migration patterns and behaviors of humpback whales.The study suggests that mating and environmental factors could have influenced the whale’s long voyage.According to the study, scientists looked at pictures on Happywhale, an online platform that collects photos of whale flukes — or tails — from scientists and members of the public from around the world. The platform uses artificial intelligence-powered photo-matching algorithms to help automatically identify the whales in submitted photos. Those matches were confirmed or rejected by data mangers, the study said.The whale was first photographed in July 2013 off the coast of Colombia in the Pacific Ocean, where it was part of a “competitive group” that included seven humpbacks. 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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    Match the Taylor Swift Song to the Poem Inspired By Her Music

    In honor of Madison Cloudfeather Nye Somehow the voices twined around a young mind encouraging gentle stanzas, open endings, even in a Texas town where they wanted you to testify before cashing a check. Heck with that, boys. I’m heading out in my little gray boots, slim volumes of poetry in my holster, William of […] More

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    After Biden Commutes 1,500 Sentences, Some Celebrate and Plan

    Among those whose sentences were commuted was Rebecca Parrett, an Arizona woman who now hopes to travel to meet her great-grandchildren for the first time.Early on Thursday morning, Rebecca Parrett received a phone call from her former hairdresser.“Have you heard the news yet?” he asked her.She hadn’t.President Biden was commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people, he told her, and perhaps Mr. Parrett might be among them, suddenly free to travel to see her family.But at that early hour, it was just a headline, the White House telling news organizations that it was the most commutations in a single day by an American president. It would be a couple of hours until the White House released the list of those being offered clemency — and until Ms. Parrett, 76, found her name.All day, she said, “I have just been in tears.”Like many of those whose sentences were commuted by President Biden on Thursday, Ms. Parrett had been released from prison during the pandemic to serve her sentence on home confinement. While that was a relief, she has lived in constant worry that she would be sent back to prison — and Republican lawmakers had been threatening to do just that, by pushing legislation that would have forced people who had been released to home confinement during the pandemic back behind bars.Now, Ms. Parrett, who receives Social Security benefits and recently moved into an apartment in Prescott Valley, Ariz., is hoping she can travel to Indiana to celebrate Christmas with her son, who recently had open-heart surgery. She has five great-grandchildren who live in Florida and Indiana and whom she has never met. As soon as she learns the details of her commutation — which could take a few days, her case manager told her — she will be making travel plans.“I’m certainly praying for just a complete release, time served,” she said.For Ms. Parrett, the commutation is a joyous turn in a journey that she almost didn’t survive. After being convicted of securities fraud and other financial crimes in 2008, Ms. Parrett, still on bond, fled to Mexico, where, she said, she planned to commit suicide. “I thought life would be better if I was gone,” she said.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