You cannot watch a game on TV these days without being inundated with gambling promotions. The rise of legal app-driven sports betting is changing the culture of sports. But new FBI arrests of prominent NBA figures raise questions about whether this gambling threatens the integrity of the game.

Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and former Cleveland Cavaliers player and assistant coach Damon Jones were arrested last week as part of “wide-ranging investigations related to illegal sports betting and rigged poker games,” said ESPN. And the arrests have put a damper on the start of the league’s 2025-26 season.

Is the genie out of the bottle?
Commissioner Adam Silver “put the NBA in bed with sports betting,” said Gary Washburn at The Boston Globe. The arrests are the league’s “worst nightmare,” but they are also “what many observers expected” when Silver decided to partner with legalized sports betting outfits. The league earned lots of money as a result, but the decision “may taint his legacy.”

It “wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call this the worst scandal in NBA history” if the charges prove true, said Keith Reed at MSNBC. Now this season will be played “under the shadow of a federal investigation,” and some fans will “question the integrity of every game they watch.” The league “may never be able to wash away the stench of these allegations.”

The arrests are “not shocking,” said Ian O’Connor at The Athletic. Sports gambling is an “all-American drug,” and online technology is the “needle that instantly injects it into the vein.” You can blame the Supreme Court for its 2018 decision to “effectively open the floodgates” to betting, but all the major sports leagues “eagerly hopped on that bus.” Now the genie is out of the bottle, and there’s “no chance of bringing it back.”

More regulation?
More regulation will be needed to “reduce opportunities for game manipulation,” Silver said to ESPN. The league is “learning as we go and working with the betting companies.”

Sports betting is “bad for sports,” as well as millions of Americans who “gamble past the point of prudence and move directly to the point of pain,” said David French at The New York Times. The sports gambling “revolution” may require more than regulation. It may “even need termination.”

Paris is reeling from one of the “most spectacular” but “brazenly simple” heists of the past century, said the BBC: the theft of Napoleonic-era jewelry and other valuables from the Louvre worth $102 million, with two arrests made this weekend. It followed the robbery of six gold nuggets worth about $1.74 million at the city’s Natural History Museum last month and preceded, by just a few hours, a burglary at another French museum of about 2,000 gold and silver coins worth about $104,000. Museums and art collections are “increasingly being targeted by criminal gangs,” inspired by some of this era’s most daring and peculiar robberies. 

‘Under his coat’
The Louvre, the world’s most-visited museum, has a “long history of thefts and attempted robberies,” said The Associated Press. One of the most famous was the theft of the “Mona Lisa” in 1911, when a former employee “walked out with the painting under his coat.” The drama surrounding the heist arguably “helped make Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait the world’s best-known artwork.” 

‘History’s biggest’ 
The robbery of 13 artworks from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 shocked the world. It remains “history’s biggest art heist,” with more than “half a billion dollars” of art vanishing into thin air, said CNN. Despite the value of the loot, “not a single motion detector was set off,” triggering talk of “ghost robbers” or, perhaps more likely, an “inside job.” None of the art has been recovered. 

The golden toilet
The 2019 theft of a $6.34 million golden toilet from Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, captured the imagination of the public. It had been on display for “just under a week before it was taken,” said The Telegraph, and was “probably melted down” afterward.

‘Takeaway Rembrandt’ 
A painting being stolen once is shocking enough, but four times borders on comical. “Jacob de Gheyn III” by Rembrandt, housed at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, was stolen in 1966, 1973, 1981 and 1983, amounting to “one of the more bizarre cases of art theft” ever recorded, said Euronews. The painting was recovered “after every theft” and has been nicknamed the Takeaway Rembrandt.

A costumed man joins Mexico City’s Catrina parade of skeletons ahead of Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead. Families gather to celebrate their deceased loved ones during Mexico’s annual holiday, which kicks off Friday evening.
Rodrigo Oropeza / AFP / Getty Images

Many of the most beloved horror movies have scenes, like Linda Blair’s rotating head in “The Exorcist,” that are so absurd that they practically invite satire. But other horror films try to build the laughs directly into the narrative. These horror comedies are one of the best ways for people who don’t really like scary movies to indulge their scare-loving friends and family during October’s spooky season.

‘Return of the Living Dead’ (1985)
Louisville, Kentucky, medical supply workers Frank (James Karen) and Freddy (Thom Mathews) open a storage barrel and unwittingly unleash a gas that reanimates the dead as shuffling brain-hungry revenants in director Dan O’Bannon’s cult classic (pictured above). A movie that “makes up for its lack of gravitas or well-developed characters by just being delightfully, deliriously fun,” said Jim Vorel at Paste Magazine. (AMC+)

‘Shaun of the Dead’ (2004)
Simon Pegg stars as Shaun, an aimless twentysomething retail worker barely hanging on to his exasperated girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield), as zombies take over the world. A “post-modern masterwork,” the film has the audience “laughing and gasping and recognizing some obscure reference from start to finish,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (Peacock)

‘Get Out’ (2017)
Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) travels to an upstate New York estate for a meet-the-parents jaunt with his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), in director Jordan Peele’s instant classic. The film brilliantly “borrows tones and archetypes from horror movies and thrillers” to show us “what it’s like to be a young black man in the United States today,” said Richard Brody at The New Yorker. (Hulu)