Free Republic

Capital One Arena was ranked as one of the top 10 most dangerous NBA arenas, according to a new study. Located in Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown, the Capital One Arena hosts Washington Wizards and Capitals games. It was ranked as the eighth most dangerous arena based on factors including fan behavior and the crime rates for the surrounding area, per a recent report by BetTennessee.com. In 2023, violent crime in Chinatown rose by 36%. The city overall experienced its deadliest year since the late 1990s and earned a top-five spot among cities with the highest homicide rates. Last year, the owner...

For decades, Las Vegas was the only place in the country where sports betting was legal. And once upon a time, the men who ran the major sports leagues were terrified of betting. The great fear was that it would corrupt the players, who would be tempted to fix games. Turns out, those fears were valid. In the last year, there’s been a spate of gambling-related controversies. The NBA is investigating Toronto’s Jontay Porter for taking himself out of two games to boost gamblers betting against his performance. Major League Baseball’s best player, Shohei Ohtani, is under a cloud after...

Russia’s Defense Ministry has unilaterally moved to revise the borders of Russian territorial waters in the Baltic Sea, drafting a government decree on the expansion without even bothering to notify NATO members Finland and Lithuania. In reaction to the surprised responses of the Baltic Sea states, the Kremlin on Wednesday issued a statement that seems bound only to make matters worse. Insisting that there’s “nothing political” about the proposed border change, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in the same breath that the “political situation” has in fact “changed significantly” since the borders were drawn. “You see how tensions are...

Election Day is less than six months away, and voters have a familiar choice of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Unless it’s The Godfather Part II, sequels rarely live up to the hype. Although it may look like a 2020 repeat, the stars are competing in a different game and under different rules. This series, ‘Judgment Day: Why 2024 rematch won’t be any old sequel, investigates the key differences from 2020. Part Three is on the first presidential election post Roe v. Wade reversal. Less than six months until the November election, Democrats are counting on women, infuriated over the...

At the Senate Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken had to contend with protesters upset over the Biden administration’s support for Israel during its brutal war on Gaza. Screams of “war criminal” and “butcher of Gaza” broke out on the Senate floor before protesters were forcibly removed. Blinken was called to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a review of the State Department’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year, and later the Senate appropriations subcommittee. While Blinken was speaking during the first hearing, protesters who had red paint on their hands stood up and called him “bloody Blinken,”...

France has backed the International Criminal Court’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli officials, in stark contrast to British and American disapproval.

Bjørg Hjorth Nørgaard, 19, has not finished high school yet but has already enlisted to pay a duty to her country. The young woman has volunteered for Denmark's four-month military training camp before university, fully aware that war has returned to Europe. "It's a personal journey … I have signed up at my own free will," she said. "It's no longer an argument that men fight wars, women do it as well now." Young men in the country have for a long time been conscripted based on a lottery system. If your number is called, it is compulsory to attend...

All along the 600-mile frontline, the Kremlin’s invasion forces are exploiting Ukrainian exhaustion and a six-month delay in American military aid. A shock offensive in the Kharkiv region has seen Putin’s troops cross the border for the first time since the 2022 invasion. Villages in the Zaporizhzhya region have been wiped off the map as Russia tries to reverse the gains of Ukraine’s 2023 counter-offensive. But the central Russian effort is focused on Donetsk region, where they are now on the outskirts of the hill-top town of Chasiv Yar. If they capture it, they will be in striking distance of...

“He’s doomed to not be loved!” Never was there a more clear-cut case of “commentator’s curse” than when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was inaugurated on a sunny Kyiv day exactly five years ago. The TV narrator’s inference was that, after a landslide election victory with 73% of the vote, it could only go downhill for him. While his approval ratings have inevitably waned, Volodymyr Zelensky has been able to use his enduring appeal, along with a desire for stability, to extend his term in office. In peacetime it would have expired, and an election would have been called. But the...

SUMMARY Around 137 Russian helicopters have been confirmed lost in the Ukrainian war. The upper bound of Russian helicopter losses claimed by Ukraine is 325; the lower bound of visually confirmed losses is 105. Russia has lost around 10% of its helicopter fleet, mostly attack helicopters like the Ka-52 "Alligator." The fog of war and exaggerated claims on both sides make it difficult to know exactly how much military equipment has been lost during the Full-Scale Russian Invasion of Ukraine. However, today is the information age and this war is being filmed like never before. Over a hundred fixed-wing Russian...

A proposed Senate bill would prohibit self-checkout lanes for customers at all California grocery and retail drug stores unless certain conditions are met. It’s all in an effort to combat theft. “I think self-checkouts are pretty good in terms of efficiency," said David Kisieu, Cal Poly student. "If I don’t have a lot of stuff, I don’t really want to wait and deal with a lot of people. I just scan something really quickly and leave." Senate Bill 1446, proposed by state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas of Los Angeles, stores would be able to offer self-checkout lanes if the checkouts are...

Abraham lincoln won a presidential election in civil-war-torn America in 1864, and fdr secured his fourth term in 1944 while American troops were in action across the globe. Winston Churchill, by contrast, avoided the electorate until the war in Europe was over in 1945, at which point he was turfed out. Holding an election when enemies are occupying your territory or raining bombs on it, and when huge numbers of your citizens are away fighting, is tricky. Not holding one is tricky in a different way, opening those in power to the charge of illegitimacy. That is the bind that...

Russia and China are “manipulating” public opinion in Britain by promoting online pro-Palestinian influencers in an effort to stoke division, Whitehall sources believe. Senior Government figures fear rogue states are promoting polarising online narratives about the Israel-Hamas conflict using an army of fake social media accounts. Analysis of some of the leading pro-Palestinian social media influencers in the UK, who have ballooned in popularity in the wake of the Oct 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, has revealed that many of their followers are fake. Experts said such a boost from fake profiles would disproportionately amplify pro-Palestinian voices – the more...

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s plan for the “day after” in Gaza includes providing weapons to local figures tied to the Palestinian Authority with international oversight, according to a report in Israel Hayom. In an explosive speech on Wednesday, Gallant stated that he will not consent to Israeli civil or military governance of Gaza, and that governance by non-Hamas Palestinian entities, accompanied by international actors, is in Israel’s interest. The newspaper report claims that Gallant’s plan, backed by the defense establishment, is to provide such groups with guns, which will be electronically monitored by Israel to prevent them being used by...

Winston Churchill will always be one of the vital figures in British history, remembered largely for his wartime leadership. But few have heard of ‘Operation Unthinkable’, one of Churchill’s most top secret war plans during his time in office. It was nothing to do with fighting the Nazis or Italy - but about invading Soviet controlled territories. The Soviet Union - or USSR, the name of the communist regime in Russia between 1922 and 1991 - controlled eastern Germany and large swathes of eastern Europe by 1945, after the Nazis were crushed. And Churchill became concerned about the communist threat...

A Michigan sheriff is sounding the alarm on "burglary tourism" — a recent trend where international organized crime groups enter the U.S. to skillfully rob wealthy suburban homes. "We believe that there has to be some kind of training camp because they come so well-trained, so equipped, and so knowledgeable about how to move and how to attack a home," Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard on Wednesday told "FOX & Friends." "They do a lot of pre-op surveillance. They determine as best they can when someone won't be in a home. They go very quickly to the home, they break...

While the majority of new recruits report having someone in the family who served, military families are becoming increasingly reluctant to recommend service to their loved ones. Blue Star Families has been tracking active-duty families’ likelihood of recommending service to a young family member or someone in their network since 2016. Only 32% of families said they would recommend their sons and daughters to go into the military, down from 55% in 2016. On the other end of the spectrum, only 15% of families said they would not recommend service to their loved ones in 2016. That number more than...

Data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) on birth statistics has revealed an alarming decline in the country’s total fertility rate from 2001 to 2023, raising concerns about maintaining the country’s population at the desired level. According to the Turkstat data, the fertility rate, which stood at 2.38 children per woman in 2001, had decreased to 1.51 children per woman by 2023, showing that Turkey’s fertility rate remained below the population’s replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. The population replacement has remained below 2.1 since 2016 and has never recorded an increase since 2001. The crude birth rate, which...

Russia’s new offensive across Ukraine’s northeastern border had been expected for months — yet it still surprised the Ukrainian soldiers stationed there to defend against it. Ukraine’s 125th Territorial Defense Brigade — stretched thin along a roughly 27-mile stretch of the Kharkiv region’s border with Russia — used reconnaissance drones to monitor, daily, how Moscow was steadily building up forces for a possible attack. But the morning it happened, May 10, the brigade lost all its video feeds due to Russian electronic jamming. Its Starlink devices — satellite internet the Ukrainian military relies on for basic communication — failed, the...

The situation in Ukraine is so serious that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had to cancel a planned trip to Spain and come straight to Kharkiv -- the country’s second largest city, which is again in real danger from the Russian advance. With exclusive access, ABC News joined Zelenskyy on a tour of a hospital in the city, with Zelenskyy, where he met soldiers injured in the northern defense, and presented them with medals of valor. “It’s really important for me to be here,” he told us, as we walked the corridors. In each ward, he stopped as an officer read out...