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    NYT Crossword Answers for June 16, 2025

    Jill Rafaloff and Michelle Sontarp start from the beginning.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesMONDAY PUZZLE — The theme of this Monday crossword, constructed by Jill Rafaloff and Michelle Sontarp, struck me as a callback to an entry in last week’s Wednesday puzzle (by Sam Koperwas and Jeff Chen): [Sounds heard during a cuteness overload]. The answer there was AWS.You may go “Aww!” at the discovery of this theme, or be in awe of the constructors’ ability to craft it. Choose your own awed-venture, I say!Today’s ThemeThe first words of 18-, 23-, 36-, 49- and 56-Across can all be categorized by the term at 64-Across.What do the above entries have in common? Let’s see: A [Short stiletto shoe] is called a KITTEN HEEL (18A). The [‘N Sync bandmate of Justin Timberlake] was JOEY FATONE (23A). [What a first crush might be dismissed as] is PUPPY LOVE (36A). Kitten, joey, puppy: Each of these is a BABY (64A) in the animal kingdom.I won’t give away the puzzle farm, but here’s a hint for the remaining entries: You’re looking for a cow and a bird.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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    Many Lawmakers Share Their Home Addresses. Political Violence Is Changing That.

    The Minnesota assassination is causing some state legislators to rethink home security and how much personal information they make public.When an assassin visited the homes of two Minnesota lawmakers on Saturday, it exposed the longstanding tension between a public official’s accessibility and their security.Both State Representative Melissa Hortman, who along with her husband Mark was killed, and State Senator John A. Hoffman, who along with his wife Yvette was wounded, readily shared their home addresses with constituents. Ms. Hortman’s address was listed on her campaign website, and Mr. Hoffman’s address had been listed on his official legislative webpage, a common practice in many states.But in the hours after the shootings, while police officers were still searching for the assassin, lawmakers across the country began to rethink their approach to privacy and safety. The Michigan State Police held security briefings for legislators. The police in Fairfax County, Va., increased patrols around lawmakers’ homes. And in North Dakota, officials decided by midday Saturday to scrub home addresses from legislator biography pages.“In light of the tragedy in Minnesota, we quickly decided to remove all addresses until our leaders have time to assess the proper balance between transparency and safety of our elected officials,” John D. Bjornson, the director of the North Dakota Legislative Council, said in an email.In interviews with lawmakers across the country, some said sharing their home address helped reassure constituents that they were part of the community and could be easily reached. But unlike governors and presidents, most state lawmakers have no special security protection when they are away from work. The country’s coarsening public discourse has left them to weigh difficult trade-offs.“Part of the reason why my address is easily found is to make it clear that I actually live in my district,” said Stephanie Sawyer Clayton, a Democratic state representative in Kansas. “If you have a P.O. box, you don’t look authentic, right?”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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    Leonard A. Lauder, Philanthropist and Cosmetics Heir, Dies at 92

    He was best known for his success in business, notably the international beauty company he built with his mother, Estée Lauder. But he was also an influential art patron.Leonard A. Lauder, the art patron and philanthropist who with his mother, Estée Lauder, built a family cosmetics business into a worldwide juggernaut that supplied generations of women with the creams, colors and scents of eternal youth, died on Saturday at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was 92.The death was announced by the Estée Lauder Companies.While best known for his business enterprises, Mr. Lauder was also one of America’s most influential philanthropists and art patrons. He gave hundreds of millions to museums, medical institutions, and breast cancer and Alzheimer’s research, as well as to other cultural, scientific and social causes. His art collections ranged from postcards to Picassos.In 2013, he pledged the most significant gift in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a trove of nearly 80 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures by Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris. Scholars put the value of the gift at $1 billion and said its quality rivaled or surpassed that of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Pompidou Center in Paris.After the gift was announced, he added another dozen major Cubist works, The New York Times reported in a profile of Mr. Lauder last year.The eldest son of Estée Lauder, who in 1946 founded the company that bears her name, Mr. Lauder was for decades a senior executive and the marketing expert and corporate strategist behind his mother, the flamboyant public face of the Lauder empire, who pitched its lipsticks, bath oils, face powders and anti-wrinkle creams with almost messianic zeal.In a business reliant on imagery and mythmaking, his mother, the daughter of a Queens merchant, had created a genteel Hungarian aristocratic past for herself and a name to go with it. Josephine Esther Lauter, the wife of a luncheonette owner, thus became the glamorous Estée Lauder.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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    Israel and Iran Trade Attacks as Toll From Conflict Mounts

    The path to diplomacy appeared to narrow after officials called off talks that had been set for Sunday between Tehran and Washington on Iran’s nuclear program.Israel and Iran exchanged more missile attacks on population centers on Sunday, brushing aside international calls to halt what has quickly become the fiercest clash in decades between the two sworn enemies.The path to diplomacy appeared to narrow after officials called off talks that had been set for Sunday between Tehran and Washington on the future of Iran’s nuclear program.In unleashing a series of powerful strikes starting on Friday, Israel said its goal was to disable Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. It appeared unlikely that this has been accomplished, experts say, and with each side vowing to pursue attacks, civilians in both countries were seeking shelter where they could.A semi-official Iranian news agency, ISNA, released photos of what it said was the aftermath of an Israeli strike Sunday that hit a residential neighborhood in central Tehran. The photos showed some people fleeing, carrying young children. Two men could be seen lying on the pavement bleeding as people tried to tend to their injuries. And a woman stood crying as she held an infant whose clothes and feet were covered in blood.Noa Shkuri, a resident in Rehovot, Israel, after her home was struck by a missile on Sunday morning.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesThe skies of Tehran, the Iranian capital, were aglow with flames from burning fuel reservoirs overnight after Israeli fighter jets bombarded the country’s vital oil and gas industries.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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    Joel Shapiro, Celebrated Post-Minimalist Sculptor, Dies at 83

    His stick-figure sculptures conveyed a surprising depth of emotion, hinting at the threat of imbalance. He also produced more than 30 large-scale commissions.Joel Shapiro, a celebrated American sculptor who sought to challenge the constraints of Minimalism in works that imbued life-size stick figures with a surprising depth of feeling, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 83.His daughter, Ivy Shapiro, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was acute myeloid leukemia.Mr. Shapiro’s best-known sculptures are easy to recognize. Constructed from wooden beams jutting in different directions, they typically suggest a human figure with outstretched arms, a blocky head and a torso shaped like a cereal box.Often the figures appear to be walking or paused in midstep; it’s not clear if they are coming toward you or moving away. They look sturdy and almost athletic compared with the gaunt walking men of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who was one of Mr. Shapiro’s heroes.A sculpture by Mr. Shapiro was unveiled at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2019.Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesDespite their narrow formal vocabulary and building-block-like clunkiness, Mr. Shapiro’s sculptures convey an uncanny range of emotion and movement. From one piece to the next, his figures variously leap with apparent joy, dance balletically, fall backward, twist in existential pain, topple onto their heads or collapse onto the floor in a tangle of arms and legs. Their subject, in the end, is balance, or rather imbalance — of both the spatial and mental sort.“Every form is loaded with the psychology of its maker,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview for this obituary in 2024.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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    Diplomacy With Iran Is Damaged, Not Dead

    The push to do a deal on the country’s nuclear program could be revived, even after the Israeli strikes scuppered the latest round of talks.If war is diplomacy by other means, diplomacy is never finished. While Israel and Iran are in the midst of what could be an extended war that could spread, the possibility of renewed talks to deal with Iran’s expanding nuclear program should not be discounted.Negotiations are on hold while the war continues, and the future of diplomacy is far from clear. Iran will feel compelled to respond to Israel, and the Israeli campaign could last for days or weeks. For now Washington does not appear to be doing anything to press both sides to stop the violence and start talking again.But the Iranians say they still want a deal, as does President Trump. The shape of future talks will inevitably depend on when and how the fighting stops.“We are prepared for any agreement aimed at ensuring Iran does not pursue nuclear weapons,” the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told foreign diplomats in Tehran on Sunday. But his country would not accept any deal that “deprives Iran of its nuclear rights,” he added, including the right to enrich uranium, albeit at low levels that can be used for civilian purposes.Mr. Araghchi said Israel did not attack to pre-empt Iran’s race toward a bomb, which Iran denies trying to develop, but to derail negotiations on a deal that Mr. Netanyahu opposes.The attacks are “an attempt to undermine diplomacy and derail negotiations,” he continued, a view shared by various Western analysts. “It is entirely clear that the Israeli regime does not want any agreement on the nuclear issue,” he said. “It does not want negotiations and does not seek diplomacy.”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 to Know About the New Head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps

    Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi was appointed to lead the group after his predecessor, Gen. Hossein Salami, was killed in an Israeli airstrike.Iran named Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi as the new head of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps after his predecessor, Gen. Hossein Salami, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Friday.Here’s what to know about the new leader of a group created to defend Iran’s Islamic system.Brig. Gen. Vahidi is best known outside Iran as a suspect in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and wounded hundreds more.Prosecutors in Argentina have issued arrest warrants for five Iranian officials, including General Vahidi, for “conceiving, planning, financing and executing” the attack. Interpol issued an alert, known as a Red Notice, in 2007 to inform the international law enforcement community that a national arrest warrant was outstanding.General Vahidi was born in 1958 in the central Iranian city of Shiraz. During the Iranian revolution in 1979, he had been studying electronic engineering at Shiraz University and around that time he joined the I.R.G.C., as well as revolutionary committees, according to Iranian media. He later received a Ph.D. in strategic studies.During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, which began in 1980, he held a number of senior security roles. He went on to lead the I.R.G.C.’s Quds Force, which specializes in intelligence and directs operations outside Iran, from 1988 until 1998.From 2005, General Vahidi served as deputy defense minister and he was made defense minister in 2009, holding the post until 2013. He was also Iran’s interior minister for three years until last August.The United States, the European Union, Canada and Britain have imposed sanctions on General Vahidi for human rights violations. More

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    In Bat Yam, south of Tel Aviv, Iran’s missile barrages killed at least six people.

    Most of those confirmed dead were women and children, according to the authorities, although they have yet to name the victims publicly.Orange-vested emergency workers were clambering over rubble on Sunday morning in the central Israeli coastal city of Bat Yam in the wake of an Iranian missile strike that killed at least six people and wounded scores of others.Paramedics were still trying to save three people who were trapped under debris, according to the Israeli military, hours after the missile evaded Israel’s air defenses. Four people remained unaccounted for, the military said.Most of those confirmed dead were women and children, according to the authorities, although they have yet to publicly name the victims. Chaotic scenes were replicated across northern and central Israel after a long night of Iranian missile attacks.Many Israelis have a certain nonchalance about missile fire, the product of both near-constant rocket attacks and the country’s sophisticated aerial defenses. But the destructive attacks in Bat Yam and elsewhere overnight — in which 10 people were confirmed killed — underscored how Israel’s current escalation with heavily armed Iran differs from fighting armed paramilitaries like Hamas and Hezbollah.In Rehovot, another city south of Tel Aviv, debris from the overnight attack filled the streets. Bloodstained bandages and white surgical gloves lay by a roadside bench. Rescue workers picked through shattered glass, searching for survivors.“Is there anyone inside?” a police officer shouted, peering into a shop damaged by the strikes.In Bat Yam, hundreds of residents who had evacuated their homes near the blast site — many of which were left uninhabitable by the explosion — gathered at a nearby school to wait for officials to tell them where to go.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