More stories

  • in

    Today’s Wordle Answer for June 22, 2024

    Scroll down to reveal letters from today’s word, or head to the comments for community hints and conversation.Welcome to The Wordle Review. Be warned: This page contains spoilers for today’s puzzle. Solve Wordle first, or scroll at your own risk.Wordle is released at midnight in your time zone. In order to accommodate all time zones, there will be two Wordle Reviews live every day, dated based on Eastern Standard Time. If you find yourself on the wrong review, check the number of your puzzle, and go to this page to find the corresponding review.To avoid spoiling the game for others, make sure you are posting a comment about Wordle 1,099.Need a hint?Give me a consonantTGive me a vowelEOpen the comments section for more hints, scores, and conversation from the Wordle community.Today’s DifficultyThe difficulty of each puzzle is determined by averaging the number of guesses provided by a small panel of testers who are paid to solve each puzzle in advance to help us catch any issues and inconsistencies.Today’s average difficulty is 5.2 guesses out of 6, or very challenging.For more in-depth analysis, visit our friend, WordleBot.Today’s WordClick to revealToday’s word is EDICT, a noun. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it refers to “an official public proclamation or order issued by authority; decree.”Our Featured ArtistJordan Moss is an illustrator and a graphic designer based in Brooklyn. With a background that includes fine art and advertising, she is excited to explore all forms and mediums. She looks to create with love and create what people love.Further ReadingSee the archive for past and future posts.If you solved for a word different from what was featured today, please refresh your page.Join the conversation on social media! Use the hashtag #wordlereview to chat with other solvers.Leave any thoughts you have in the comments! Please follow community guidelines:Be kind. Comments are moderated for civility.Having a technical issue? Use the help button in the settings menu of the Games app.See the Wordle Glossary for information on how to talk about Wordle.Want to talk about Spelling Bee? Check out our Spelling Bee Forum.Want to talk about Connections? Check out our Connections Companion.Trying to go back to the puzzle? More

  • in

    Toxic Moonshine Leaves at Least 53 Dead in India’s South

    Consumption of tainted bootleg alcohol has caused several instances of mass deaths in recent years as drinkers seek out illicit liquor to save money or evade the law.The death toll from tainted liquor in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu has reached 53, officials say, and is likely to rise, with many others in critical condition. The victims were sickened by drinking a bootleg alcohol with a high content of methanol.Rajat Chaturvedi, the police superintendent in the Kallakurichi District, where the past week’s deaths have occurred, said that 98 people had been hospitalized. “The dead and hospitalized people are mostly daily wage laborers,” he said.The first death, from drinking local alcohol sold in small pouches for about 50 cents, Mr. Chaturvedi said, was reported on Wednesday. The village of Karunapuram was the worst hit, with more than a dozen victims receiving last rites in a mass cremation on Thursday.Consumption of tainted alcohol has caused several mass-casualty events across India in recent years. In some states that prohibit alcohol, people turn to smuggled or unregulated liquor. Elsewhere, villagers choose the bootleg product because of its lower price.In 2019, at least 150 people died in two districts of the northeastern state of Assam from drinking bootleg alcohol. Weeks earlier, 100 people had died in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.In August 2020, at least 120 people died in Punjab from drinking toxic local alcohol, with 92 of the deaths in just one district.In December 2022, at least 70 people died from drinking tainted alcohol in the eastern state of Bihar. Bihar has banned the sale and consumption of alcohol since 2016, but people consume illegal smuggled alcohol or cross the border into Nepal for cheap local alcohol.Last year, at least 22 people died from consuming similar toxic local alcohol in two other districts of Tamil Nadu. The latest mass casualty has put the state’s government under pressure from opposition leaders as well as from the state’s high court. Opposition lawmakers, who arrived at the assembly dressed in black, called for the resignation of Tamil Nadu’s chief minister, M.K. Stalin.Mr. Stalin announced an investigation headed by a retired judge and ordered the police across the state to crack down on the homemade liquor trade.The man accused of making this week’s batch of poisonous alcohol has been arrested, along with his wife and at least one other person, according to police officials. The Kallakurichi District’s top civilian official has been transferred, while several police officers have been suspended.Local residents have said that the police were complicit, taking a cut from the bootlegger’s peddlers who brought the alcohol to the villages, according to the Indian news outlet The News Minute.“We cannot say direct involvement of local police, but due to their lack of action, police people were suspended, right from constable to deputy superintendent of police,” said Mr. Chaturvedi, who took charge of the district’s police force after the tragedy. More

  • in

    How a Family of Taekwondo Instructors Stopped a Sexual Assault

    The An family, whose ages range from 18 to 59, stopped the sexual assault of a woman in Katy, Texas, on Tuesday and handed the attacker over to the police.Simon An had just arrived with his parents, his older sister and his younger brother at his family’s taekwondo school in Katy, Texas, on Tuesday afternoon when they heard a scream so loud it reminded him of a horror movie.That was when the An family, all of whom are taekwondo instructors, sprang into action and stopped a sexual assault at the business next door, delivering the attacker to the police.Sheriff Ed Gonzalez of Harris County confirmed the account in a post on Facebook and thanked the An family, calling them “a group of good Samaritans.”Alex Robinson, 19, faces a felony charge of attempted sexual assault in connection with the attack, according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.“By utilizing their training and discipline, they managed to stop the assault and hold him” until the police arrived, Sheriff Gonzalez said of the An family.At around 4 p.m. Tuesday, the An family arrived at the Yong-In Tae Kwon Do school to prepare for evening classes. They were still in the parking lot when Han and Hong An, the parents, heard a high-pitched scream from the business next door, according to the oldest son, Simon An, 20.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

  • in

    Going After the Middleman

    Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, the Justice Department’s top antitrust official, talked with DealBook about the agency’s focus on middlemen companies and the challenge of A.I.With the presidential election approaching, many chief executives have been glued to the shot clock counting down to Election Day, wondering which companies and industries the Biden-appointed regulatory apparatus — perhaps the most aggressive in a generation — may try to target before it goes to zero.Business leaders have been combing through comments and transcripts to try to understand the pending priorities of regulators like Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division.They’ve zeroed in on what may sound like a nerdy legal theory, but one that could have huge implications: the tyranny of the intermediary, middleman companies that abuse their role by squeezing out competition or creating artificially expensive moats. The Justice Department has already made one high-profile strike along these lines, suing to break up Ticketmaster and Live Nation.It is reportedly investigating at least two others. One is RealPage, a property management company that uses artificial intelligence to suggest prices and has already been sued by renters accusing it of facilitating a new type of collusion. The second is UnitedHealth Group, the health care conglomerate that owns a cobweb of businesses that include an insurer and another unit that employs about 10,000 physicians in the United States.RealPage said in a statement this week it was “proud of the role our customers play in providing safe and affordable housing to millions of people.” It has also launched a website about its software.Guessing what other names could be on the list has become something of a parlor game for dealmakers. A travel booking service that jacks up fees? A brokerage firm that an apartment building requires its renters to use? Shareholder advisory firms that can determine whether a deal goes through? Marketplaces that take a cut every time an NFT changes hands?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

  • in

    2 Novels Set Over Very Memorable Days

    A dinner party at the other woman’s house; the evening before a jail sentence.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesDear readers,With apologies to Stephen Hawking, anyone who’s ever experienced a root canal or a first kiss knows something about the relativity of time. Who hasn’t felt entire weeks go by like flashcards, or wondered why certain situations (a bad date, a flight delay) seem to open up wormhole portals to eternity?C’est la vie, of course, unless you are some type of time-lord wizard. But novelists are wizards, or at least magicians, and one of their favorite tricks is to fit whole narrative worlds inside a single day, book-shaped ships squeezed into bottles.The day itself doesn’t have to be noteworthy or even nominally eventful, which is often the point; think of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, preparing to host her umpteenth plummy soirée, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, whose big score in the gulag is getting an extra bread crust and two bowls of gruel. But watch what a smart writer can do with the neat little nesting dolls of diversion and digression, plot and memory.The authors in this week’s newsletter take bigger swings, in that the days they build their stories around are so obviously the kind you would circle in red on a calendar. Plot machinery, though, still takes a second seat to character, observation and style. Because the best magic trick, the one that makes sleepless nights and long empty afternoons disappear, doesn’t rest on clever conceits; it just has to be a really good read.— LeahWe 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

  • in

    What I Was Thinking as We Were Sinking

    On This Week’s Episode:It’s funny the things that go through your head during a disaster.This is a re-run of an episode that first aired in April 2023.Ike SriskandarajahNew York Times Audio is home to “This American Life.” New episodes debut in our app a day early. Download the app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. More

  • in

    Man Fatally Stabbed at Manhattan Subway Station, Police Say

    The stabbing, during a dispute between two people, occurred just before 6 p.m. at the West 175th Street A train station.A 40-year-old man was fatally stabbed at an Upper Manhattan subway station Friday night during a dispute with another person, the police said.Officers responding to a 911 call about a person stabbed at the West 175th Street A train station in Washington Heights just before 6 p.m. found the man near the turnstiles on the mezzanine level, the police said. He had been stabbed several times in the torso, the police said.The man, whose name was not released pending notification of his family, was taken to Harlem Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, the police said.No arrests had been made as of Friday night, and the investigation was continuing, the police said.Entrances to the 175th Street station were closed during the investigation, and trains were skipping the station.Dakota Santiago for The New York TimesAround 8:30 p.m., a station entrance on Fort Washington Avenue between West 174th and 175th Streets was closed off with yellow police tape. A trains were skipping the station, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subways. Police officers at the station entrances were directing riders to take the bus or head to stations at West 181st or 168th Streets.M.T.A. surveys show that many riders feel unsafe, but data has not always confirmed the public’s perception. Crime rates rose during the coronavirus pandemic starting in 2020, but last year overall crime in the transit system fell nearly 3 percent compared with 2022 even as the number of daily riders rose 14 percent.There have been five murders in the transit system this year through June 16, according to police data, compared with four during the same time period last year. Overall major crime in the transit system this year is down 5.5 percent compared with the same time period last year. More

  • in

    Florida to Pay Millions to Victims of Abuses at Notorious Reform School

    A $20 million program will give financial restitution to students who endured abuse and neglect at the hands of the state.The horrors inflicted on hundreds of boys at a notorious reform school in the Florida Panhandle remain excruciating for survivors to recount, all these years later. Forced labor. Brutal floggings. Sexual abuse.For more than 15 years, survivors of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, who are now old men, have traveled to the State Capitol in Tallahassee to share their deeply painful memories and implore politicians for justice — for themselves and for the dozens of boys who died at the school.In 2017, survivors, many of them Black, received an official apology. On Friday, Florida went further: Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation creating a $20 million program to give financial restitution to the victims who endured abuse and neglect at the hands of the state. Mr. DeSantis signed the bill in private, his office announced late on Friday.The compensation program will allow applications from survivors who were “confined” to the Dozier school between 1940 and 1975 and who suffered from “mental, physical, or sexual abuse perpetrated by school personnel.” Survivors may also apply if they were sent to the Florida School for Boys at Okeechobee, known as the Okeechobee school, which was opened in 1955 to address overcrowding at Dozier.Applications will be due by Dec. 31. Each approved applicant will receive an equal share of the funds and waive the right to seek any further state compensation related to their time at the schools.Florida lawmakers approved the program unanimously this year. Several survivors testified at an emotional State Senate committee hearing in February that appeared to leave some lawmakers at a loss for words.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