Latest news with #ClosingTime
Time of India
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
NYT Connections Hints June 13: Here's how to break down each category of puzzle #733 for complete answers
What Is NYT Connections? Today's Puzzle Setup (June 13, 2025) Yellow: PERSPECTIVE PERSPECTIVE Green: SEEN AT AN ICE CREAM SHOP SEEN AT AN ICE CREAM SHOP Blue: HIT SONGS OF 1998 HIT SONGS OF 1998 Purple: HOT _ _ _ Hints to Get You Started Live Events Yellow (#easiest): "Seeing this will solve a lot of arguments." Green: "Often found near ice creams." Blue: "A particular year had all these tunes." Purple: "A hot word comes before all these." Solutions: Word Sets and Categories Yellow (Perspective): think angles, lenses, and that familiar expression 'point of view.' Green (Ice Cream Shop): what you hold — cone, cup, little spoon, scoop. Blue (1998 Hits): songs that defined that year—Closing Time (Semisonic), Iris (Goo Goo Dolls), One Week (Barenaked Ladies), Too Close (Next). Purple (Hot _ _ _): common pairings: hot dog, hot potato, hot rod, hot water bottle. Tips and Observations Start with the Yellow category, which is usually the easiest; today it refers to viewpoint-related words. Notice Green and Blue both rely on contexts—desserts and music history—so thinking of where each word belongs matters. The Purple set is a classic fill-in-the-blank theme: 'Hot ___' cues four familiar terms. FAQs What is NYT Connections? How difficult was today's puzzle? (You can now subscribe to our (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel For word puzzle enthusiasts, NYT Connections continues to be a daily must-do. This unique game challenges players to group 16 words into four thematic sets, each colour-coded by difficulty. Here's a detailed guide to correctly solving today's puzzle (#733), with useful NYT connections hints June 13 and the full answer by the success of Wordle, the New York Times launched Connections — a 4×4 word-association game available for free on mobile and desktop. Players must identify thematic clusters of four words and sort them into Yellow, Green, Blue, and Purple categories based on increasing day features fresh categories. For Friday, June 13, the themes, as mentioned in a report by Beebom, included:These themes are hinted at through today's connections June 13 prompts, helping set your mental clues in make your job easier, here are more refined hints, as per a Beebom report:These clues are curated to nudge built-in wordplay logic, guiding you to match each cluster NYT Connections ranked moderate in complexity — about 3 out of 5. Beginning with perspective-related words reveals your mental flow, while the ice-cream cluster soon follows with its familiar vocabulary. Songs from 1998 may trip up younger solvers, but a quick recall exercise helps, and the Purple 'Hot ___' category ties everything Connections is a daily word association puzzle by The New York Times. Players must group 16 random words into four categories of four words each, based on shared themes or concepts. Categories are color-coded from easiest (Yellow) to hardest (Purple).June 13's puzzle was moderately difficult — approximately 3 out of 5 in complexity. While the Yellow and Green sets were fairly straightforward, the 1998 song references in the Blue group may challenge younger players. The Purple category required recognizing common compound phrases beginning with "Hot."
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
John Oliver on Trump deportations: ‘usually blatantly racist and always cruel'
John Oliver took a deep dive through the Trump administration's brutal and bewildering campaign of deportations on Sunday evening, starting with the White House's 'nauseating social media posts'. Posts to the official White House Instagram account include a video of shackled people led on to a plane soundtracked to the song Closing Time by Semisonic, along with the caption 'you don't have to go home but you can't stay here.' The track 'obviously isn't the right song choice', the Last Week Tonight host said. 'The right song choice would be no song at all, because deportation Instagram reel is a combination of words that should never exist, like 'Oscar winner Mr Beast' or 'Stephen Miller nudes' or 'Bill Belichick speaks about his relationship with 24-year-old girlfriend.'' (Semisonic has denounced the choice of the song.) The video underscored one of Oliver's key points: 'For all this administration's talk of prioritizing hardened criminals, in practice it seems to value speed, volume and spectacle over all else.' Though Trump's administration has claimed to focus on 'violent criminals', CBS 60 Minutes was unable to find criminal records for over 75% of 238 migrants sent to a Salvadorian prison, and the government even conceded that one man, Kilmar Ábrego García, was sent there due to an 'administrative error'. 'For weeks now, it has been scrambling to come up with reasons why it was OK to send that man to a foreign prison,' said Oliver, 'which has been hard for them to do, given that it had a court order protecting him from deportation to El Salvador and no criminal record.' So Trump posted an image on social media of a photo of Ábrego García's hand with markups attempting to show that his tattoos indicated that he was a member of the gang MS-13. And in an interview with the ABC News correspondent Terry Moran pegged to his first 100 days in office, Trump tried to argue that the clearly superimposed text of 'MS-13' were actually tattooed on Ábrego García's hand. Oliver played the 'absolutely incredible' 90-second clip in full before responding himself: 'Terry, Terry, Terry, you're in hell, Terry. Terry, this is hell right now. I'm genuinely shocked Trump doesn't drink alcohol because that is the most 'drunk at an Ihop' conversation I think I've ever heard. 'And no disrespect to Terry, but maybe don't move on from that,' he continued. 'I know you've got other questions to get to, but if the president of the United States is trying to tell you that this amateur-hour Photoshop is real, let him go get the picture and make him say it again. Point to that Helvetica-looking 'M', and make the president say, 'Yes, I believe that artless M that's weirdly clearer and darker than all the other tattoos is real.' Make him say I believe that man went to a tattoo parlor and said, 'The skull's pretty spooky, but what I'd really like is a neatly aligned '3' directly on the bone of my knuckle, and can you please make it so that it doesn't stretch or bend with the natural curves of the human hand and also make it look like a typewriter did it?' 'Because, Terry, sometimes when Trump's doing his normal racist blue sky, you do need to cut him off to slow the flow of hatred into the world,' he added. 'But if he wants to tell America that this laughably doctored picture is evidence of a major threat to American safety, you have an obligation to let the man cook. 'And for what it's worth, if Trump's going to hash out those claims, he probably should be doing that in court, not on TV, and after he's already shipped someone off to a foreign prison,' he continued. 'But Ábrego García is just one of many horrifying stories surrounding immigration right now,' as the administration has embarked on a fear-based crackdown with blatant disregard for the rule of law. In the first 100 days of his term, Trump's administration undertook 181 immigration-specific executive actions – a sixfold increase over that same period in his first term. To do so, it has bent arcane laws and scoured databases to absurd ends. Oliver pointed to the case of Suguru Onda, a PhD student at Brigham Young University in Utah, who had his legal status revoked after appearing on a criminal records database by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Onda, who is from Japan, had no criminal charges, just two speeding tickets and a citation for catching one too many fish. 'That is ridiculous,' Oliver fumed. 'If you can be flagged for deportation for catching one too many fish, then I truly fear for Henry Winkler. We could be just days away from seeing him in an El Salvador prison, which I'm sure the White House will then justify by badly Photoshopping an MS-13 tattoo on to his neck.' Ice later reversed the decision on Onda's legal status, 'but this all feels like the inevitable result of a campaign that fearmongered about an epidemic of so-called migrant crime which, as we've discussed before, was wildly overblown', Oliver explained. 'But having promised mass deportations and even printed signs for people to wave around demanding them, they're now scrambling to deliver.' According to multiple reports, the administration has instructed Ice officials to ramp up arrests to 1,200-1,500 people a day, and no longer target the supposed 'worst offenders' first. 'What the administration is doing is sometimes targeted, sometimes arbitrary, usually blatantly racist and always cruel,' said Oliver, such as deporting a child back to Honduras without his medication for stage four cancer. The cruelty is 'the heart of all of this', Oliver detailed, 'which is Trump loudly selling his supporters the lie that he'll protect them from existential threats, only to further government overreach and state violence while deporting makeup artists, unlucky soccer fans and four-year-olds with cancer'. The host called for pressure on elected officials to try to stop Trump's illegal overreach. 'To their credit, a number of prominent Democrats have gone to El Salvador to call attention to this,' he said. 'Which is definitely preferable to the approach others have taken.' He cited anonymous House Democrats quoted as asking, 'Should it be the big issue for Democrats? Probably not,' and 'complaining that rather than talking about the tariff policy and the economy, we're going to go take the bait for one hairdresser? 'Which is absolutely enraging,' he continued, 'especially as many voters do seem to get the clear problem with deporting people without due process to a prison for life, even in red states.' Oliver urged viewers to call their representatives and make them aware of public opinion. 'It can make a difference,' he said, pointing to the former supreme court chief justice William Rehnquist's assertion that, 'no honorable judge would ever cast his vote because he thought the majority of the public wanted him to vote that way but that in certain cases, judges are undeniably influenced by the great tides of public opinion.' 'I would argue the moment we're in right now isn't just worthy of a great tide,' Oliver concluded. 'It is worthy of a fucking tsunami because this is an absolute outrage and it is one where it is important to remind our elected leaders that all people are worthy of safety, protection and due process.'
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Meme politics: White House embraces aggressive alt-right online culture
Posting for provocation's sake has long been the province of internet antagonists and the alt-right, but these days, even the official White House X account is embracing the communications strategy that often celebrates others' suffering. Recently, the account posted about the arrest of a weeping, handcuffed alleged felon before her deportation by depicting her likeness in the AI-generated Ghibli style that has flooded the internet, giving the image of her sobbing an animated aesthetic. Not long prior, the account posted a video of shackled deportees set to the tune of "Closing Time," the 90's-era Semisonic hit. "I think it sums up our immigration policy pretty well: 'You don't have to go home but you can't stay here,'" said Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, quoting the lyrics with a smile as she defended the message, which Semisonic immediately denounced. And then there was the Valentine's Day post: "Roses are Red / Violets are Blue / Come Here Illegally / And We'll Deport You" read a card featuring the floating heads of President Donald Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan. For Marcus Maloney, a sociology professor at Coventry University, it is a social media strategy that speaks to "the 4Chanification of American politics." An image-based online forum that has become a hub of disinformation, 4Chan was an early home of "shitposting," a brand of internet communication intended to shock, offend or muddle discourse with absurdity. And if Trump 1.0 embraced the 2016-era alt-right "shitposters" who bolstered his candidacy, Trump 2.0 is incorporating their methods into official communication channels. It is a new tactic on an account that not long ago, even in the Republican president's first term, featured a stream of press releases and relatively innocuous statements. Responding to online outrage over the Ghibli portrayal of a deportation arrest, White House communications official Kaelan Dorr re-posted the image, vowing that "the arrests will continue. The memes will continue." "They're leaning pretty heavily into meme culture and to chronically online individuals," said Jacob Neiheisel, a political science professor at the University of Buffalo. "That's where a lot of the energy in the MAGA movement is." - Offensive 'outsider' - Trump presented himself as the iconoclastic opposite of the more polished Democrats when he won his first term. By the time he won his second, "the gloves were really off in terms of his communication style -- and people really responded to that," Maloney said, adding that the offensiveness can actually come off as more "authentic." "That offensiveness signals a kind of outsider status," he continued, "even though we're talking about a guy who's a billionaire." The trolling now adopted by the White House is meant to simultaneously shock and be brushed off as a joke, the genre of "locker room talk" that has been a through-line of Trump's non-consecutive presidencies. The former reality TV star has brought that genre's energy to governing, firing off frenetic statements that often denigrate his opponents and apply crass labels to them. This style appeals to people already fluent in trolling, particularly younger males, Neiheisel said: "It's funny for them. It's entertainment." - Demeaning and trivializing - Another of the White House's infamous posts likened images and sounds of shackled people boarding a deportation plane to ASMR, the auditory-sensory phenomenon that sees people find relaxation or pleasure in certain sounds. The flippant language "hurts, ultimately, the gravitas of the presidency -- the world's most powerful office -- and it hurts the perception of it not only domestically but internationally," said Mark Hass, a digital marketing expert and strategic communication professor at Arizona State University. "It trivializes" important issues like immigration and demeans people, Hass said. And it can represent an insidious reflection of the Trump administration's political aims, Maloney said. That callousness can open the door to policies that dehumanize or render vulnerable minority groups, he added. "It's a nihilism in respect specifically to how things are communicated," he said. "In terms of what they're actually doing," he said, it's "a mainstreaming of far-right dream policies." mdo/aha
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson says it's 'more embarrassing' to be an American now than during the Vietnam War
Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson says it's "more embarrassing" to be an American now than during the Vietnam War. Wilson, 71, made the remark in a recent interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where she reflected on the legendary rock group's 1975 hit "Crazy on You," which was her sister, Heart vocalist Ann Wilson's critique of the Vietnam War. "We were kind of embarrassed at that time to call ourselves American because of the dirty politics of the Vietnam War," Wilson shared. "To be as subtle as possible, it's more embarrassing now," she said. Madonna Takes Aim At Trump Admin In Pro-lgbtq+ Post: 'Dismantling All The Freedoms We Have Been Fighting For' She made the case that the songs fit for the tumultuous political climate of the time still resonate today. Read On The Fox News App One of the band's most popular hits, "Barracuda," for instance, "took aim at "a real sleazeball with a satin jacket" who, at the time the song was written in the 1970s, "wanted to make more money out of" the women in the band, the article reads. Wilson suggested the track's commentary on sexism and oppression wasn't specific to its day and the issue persists nearly 50 years later. "[It's] even more relevant in the salacious billionaire culture with the grab-them-by-the-(expletive) mentality," she said, referencing a controversial 2005 remark by President Donald Trump that The Washington Post published before the 2016 election. Semisonic Band Condemns White House's Use Of Their 'Closing Time' Song In Deportation Video The Wilson sisters have been no fans of Trump for some time, however. Ann, 74, told The Hill in 2018 that anyone but Trump could use "Barracuda" on the campaign trail, telling the outlet she "definitely wouldn't" vote for him in the 2020 race, but would have to "do some research" and "think about" who her pick would be instead. She supported Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the 2016 race, the outlet reported. Late Republican Sen. John McCain, who challenged former President Barack Obama for the White House in 2008, got ire from Nancy Wilson for continuing to use "Barracuda" as a theme for his running mate, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, on the campaign trail despite being asked to stop. According to The Hill, she told at the time, "I think it's completely unfair to be so misrepresented. I feel completely f—ed over." Though Nancy sees many of the societal issues of the 1970s in today's world, she told the Journal Sentinel she predicts change will come with time. "I think for women in the culture the pendulum will come back again, and there'll be another renaissance in the arts to push back against the oppression of the cranky old rich White guys," she said. "I hope I am alive to see that next revolution," she article source: Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson says it's 'more embarrassing' to be an American now than during the Vietnam War
Express Tribune
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Semisonic Condemns White House for Using ‘Closing Time' in Deportation Video
The band Semisonic has denounced the Trump administration for using their 1998 hit Closing Time in a White House social media post about deportations. The video featured a handcuffed man being searched at an airport while the song's lyrics, 'You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here,' played in the background. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency retweeted the post, adding: 'It's closing time. We are making America safe again.' However, Semisonic quickly responded, criticizing the video and its message. 'We did not authorize or condone the White House's use of Closing Time in any way,' the band wrote on Facebook. 'And no, they didn't ask. The song is about joy, possibilities, and hope—they have missed the point entirely.' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the post, stating on Monday that 'our entire government clearly is leaning into the message of this president.' Closing Time, a Grammy-nominated track from the band's album Feeling Strangely Fine, was a commercial success, peaking at No. 43 on the Billboard 200. Semisonic joins a long list of artists who have objected to the Trump administration's unauthorized use of their music. Rihanna, Bruce Springsteen, Phil Collins, and Céline Dion have all spoken out against similar incidents. In some cases, artists like Steven Tyler and Neil Young have even issued cease-and-desist letters. This latest controversy highlights ongoing tensions between musicians and political figures over the unauthorized use of music to push partisan messages.
