Free Republic

A Massachusetts charter school ended a girls’ varsity basketball game at halftime on February 8 after multiple players were injured by a trans-identified male on the opposing team. The coach of the Collegiate Charter School of Lowell Girls’ Basketball Team made the decision to end the game against KIPP Academy "after watching a third player injured in the game," a press release from the school states. "The bench was already depleted going into the game with the 12-player roster having four players unable to play. When the coach saw three more girls go down in the first half leaving him...

THE DEATH of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s foremost opposition leader, in a Siberian gulag on February 16th would by itself have served as a shock to Europe. But for leaders gathered at the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of defence and security bigwigs, Mr Navalny’s demise was just one of several ominous developments for the continent. On February 17th Ukraine’s army, starved of American ammunition by Congress’s failure to pass a supplemental aid bill, was forced to withdraw from the eastern town of Avdiivka. That handed Vladimir Putin his first military victory in almost a year.The deadlock in Congress reflects...

If you can't handle spice, you might want to skip this new coffee craze in China. A coffee shop in China has a bizarre beverage on its menu — chilli coffee. Jiangxi's Spicy Chilli Latte, a spice-infused coffee, was launched by Jingshi Coffee, a coffee chain in Jiangxi province, eastern China last December, South China Morning Post reported. A clip posted by Chinese video platform Pear Video on Weibo, showed a Jingshi Coffee employee adding sliced peppers and some hot pepper powder in a cup of iced latte before serving it. According to local media, the popular beverage costs about...

Dutch motorist Tim Hansenn was fined 380 euros for using his phone while driving. But there was one problem: He wasn't using his phone at all. In an interview with Belgian news outlet HLN last week, as well as in a blog post on his company's website, Hansenn explained how he was the inadvertent victim of faulty artificial intelligence-powered smart cameras that work to spot drivers using their phones. Hansenn, who works with AI as part of his job with the firm Nippur, found the photo taken by the smart cameras. In it, he was clearly scratching his head with...

The world just experienced its hottest January on record, continuing a run of exceptional heat fuelled by climate change, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Thursday (Feb 8). Last month surpassed the previous warmest January, which occurred in 2020, in C3S's records going back to 1950. The exceptional month came after 2023 ranked as the planet's hottest year in global records going back to 1850, as human-caused climate change and the El Nino weather phenomenon, which warms the surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, pushed temperatures higher.