Top News From WTOP - 6PM Update - August 11, 2026

Guided by a shared purpose and a spirit of collaboration, Emory University students push each other to think creatively and work cooperatively, knowing that different perspectives lead to new ideas. What makes Emory special is that it has very rigorous academics, but a community that is willing to support each other. People are always willing to study together and work hard together. Learn more at emory.edu. What's the secret recipe to making money topics interesting? I think you start off by relating money to your everyday life, like more vacations, more living, less worry about your next paycheck. And that's how we built the Stacky Benjamin Netanyahu Show, the personal finance show. It's full of good times, great laughs, and big lessons. Whether you're paying off debt, building wealth, or just trying to stop hemorrhging money at the grocery store. We got you. Find the Stacky Benjamin Netanyahu Show wherever you get your podcasts. The greatest money show on earth, now part of the Gamet Podcast Network. B. From ABC News, I'm Michelle Franzen. Robert Gilman, a veteran U.S. Marine on a flight to the U.S. after being released from a Russian prison, the State Department says he was wrongfully detained. Here's ABC's Patrick Rievel. Gilman's family have said that he was essentially mistreated psychologically and physically abused over the four years. They say he was force-fed drugs and deprived of food and sleep. But in recent days, they've warned that his health had severely deteriorated. He was being fed through a child. tube, they say, and in a disassociative stupor, saying basically he was unable to eat or speak. And they said that they feared he could die imminently, which is perhaps what has led Russia to release him now. Gilman will receive a medical evaluation at a Texas military base. The ongoing war with Iran and attacks on vessels intensifying in the Gulf region, critical shipping waterways, slowing shipments of oil and goods. New data shows Americans are struggling with costs and debt. We owe more and we're not. paying our bills on time the Federal Reserve Bank of New York says Americans now owe 1.26 trillion dollars on credit cards and 12% of us are delinquent in paying even the minimum amount the high cost of gas groceries and household items all contributing one thing helping those lucky enough to own a home Equity. More people are tapping into that. Figuring a refinanced mortgage at a little over 6.5% makes more sense than a credit card balance of 23%. Sherry Preston, ABC News. More than 220 people now confirmed dead following yesterday's major earthquake in Western Columbia. Cruise scrambling to dig through the rubble for survivors. A U.S. response team has been deployed to assist crews. Severe storms raising the risk of tornadoes and flooding from the Midwest to the east coast. or Mike DeWine urging residents to stay off roads. The odds are that we're going to have continuous problems with flooding for the next several days at least. The line says the storms are blamed for at least one death. You're listening to ABC News. 602 here on WDTOP on this August 11th, 2026. We still have sunny skies in 89 DC.

They say it's much more than a renovation. It's going to be essentially a brand new building. Jim Jordan Silverman is president of venues for monumental sports. He says they're essentially taking Capital One Arena down to its studs. Expanding the footprint fully to the property line that will allow us to expand our concourses. And the outside of the building will be wrapped in ETFE veil, which is like a plastic material. That will have the ability to be lit up. It could be red on caps nights, blue on wizards. It could be rainbow on Pride night. We're really excited to have. the building show off and really meet the energy of all of our events. Plus, the new entrance sits right at the corner of 7th Street leading into a large arrival hall. And what we're trying to do is have a much more streamlined arrival sequence. So like people really have that wow moment when they arrive and that we've never really had before. So how would the inside of Capital One Arena change? Well, you'll find out in the next hour. Jimmy Alexander, WTOP News. Well, the next time you order food, it may be delivered to you by a robot that resembles... Pixar's W.TOP's Lukeert tells us those robots called Cocoa started running around parts of D.C. last month. Coco is here to make delivery more sustainable, affordable, cost effective and efficient for local merchants and their customers. Carl Hanson with Coco says they are working with numerous restaurants like Bowtie and Ghost Burger to handle deliveries within two miles of the location. We're here when the weather's bad, if it's snowing, if it's raining. Four-wheeled bot can handle any obstacle in it. its way and even re-traffic signals. Tree Ranch falls and is blocking the sidewalk or a scooter's falling over and is blocking the sidewalk. Our bot will get rerouted around the obstruction. The obstructions added to our map. When they arrive at the door, you unlock it with your phone and take the food from the insulated compartment and enjoy. Coco currently is just operating near Logan Circle, but Hansen says they'll be expanding operations across D.C. in the near future. Luke Look at WTOP News. Money news here on WTOP. On to John Wardow. The Capital One name is going to stay on the arena in downtown D.C. for years to come. The financial giant and monumental sports and entertainment have inked a deal. Capital One has extended naming rights for another 20 years through 2047. This comes as monumental invest more than a billion dollars on overhauling the arena. From the home of the Caps, Mystics and Wizards to your home. Existing home sales slipped almost 2% last month, but the median home price rose to $434,000. That was the second highest median price on record. On Wall Street, the major stock averages saw red on Tuesday. The Dow Jay Jones Industrial Leverage down 184 points. The S&P 500 lost 24, and the NASDAQ gave back 159 points. John Werdock, WTOPP News. T-O-P. Without this historic book, we might never know Shakespeare today. I'm at Kofax. They are some of the rarest and earliest published works of William Shakespeare. We're talking more than four centuries old, and you can find them right here in D.C. In today's episode of Matt About Town, WTOP's Matt Cofax dives deep into the first folios on Capitol Hill. It is surprising to some people that so much Shakespeare material is here in Washington, D.C., rather than somewhere in England. It was hard to comprehend the books I was staring at were published four centuries ago in...

1623. But there they were. Titles like Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth with 403-year-old ink, 153 years longer than America has even been around. To be or not to be? That is the question. It was the first time these plays were brought together in print in one place. These priceless volumes of history kept behind a massive glass case in the dimly lit exhibition hall of Folger really have influenced. so many aspects of our modern language and entertainment systems today. Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York. We think there's 38 plays associated generally with Shakespeare today. In the first folio, in 1623, they included 36 plays. Director of exhibitions, Greg Prickman, my tour guide for the day, told me that before the 1620s, 18 of Shakespeare's plays, including some of his most well-known, had never been officially published anywhere, meaning that without the first folios, we might not know Shakespeare in the same way we do today, if at all. Tomorrow. And tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day. Without that, would we have Macbeth? Not sure. We don't know if it would have somehow emerged in some other format. There's certainly a school of thought that says one of the reasons why he is so revered today is because this book was created. There are 235 first folios known to man. The Folger Shakespeare Library has 82 of them, meaning a third of all copies in existence are under this one roof in the heart of the city. When you really get into these, something's been done to every single copy. We call it sophistication. Although they're the same collection of works on the surface, each folio... has its own unique characteristics, like different printings of your favorite first edition novel. So all of these books, in addition to having survived one way or another in various degrees of completeness, they've been owned and used by people. So they're full of marks, notes, annotations. The best part is that getting to look at these first folios was just an appetizer. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be dropping an entire miniseries from Folger, diving deeper into the folios. getting an exclusive tour of their rare vault of late Middle Ages and Renaissance texts and highlighting what conservators do to preserve these classics we still know and love today. There's a ton that we can learn from this material from the past. It is the baseline for so much of what we do. In the district, Matt Kofax. Parting is such sweet sorrow. WTOP News. This is part one of a five-part Folger Library series. To watch the videos, head over to WTOP. and search mac cofact up ahead on w t o p the mystics are a measuring stick win away from a franchise record and they might roll the dice on even more in Vegas

DC Sports Filtered is next. The Mystics take a seven-game winning streak into Las Vegas tonight. It makes the team just one win shy of the longest unbeaten run in franchise history. In the latest DC Sports Filter, WTOP's Rob Wood Fork tells us that the newest veteran on the team could be the reason why the string of victories could keep up. Start with what just changed for the mystics over the weekend. But Nigelaney Hamilton was claimed off waivers, a 10-year vet, two-time all-defensive selection, and a starter during New York's 2024 title run. Drop a resume like that into the youngest locker room in WMBA history, and you've handed a team that's already learning on the fly a map for where it's going. Not that this red-hot group needed an accelerant. The worst turnover team in the league all year has cleaned it up dramatically during this seven-game win streak. Proof that it's not just a hot shooting streak they're riding. It's a young team actually figuring it out. Now the stakes get real in Vegas. Beat the Aces tonight, and it's a new franchise record eight straight wins in a single season. But that's just the opener. Win both games in Vegas this week, and Washington doesn't just sweep the defending champs. They pull even with the Aces for third place in the entire WMBA. However, the chips fall in Vegas, the mystics are ahead of schedule. A season sweep of a three-time champion puts them on a different schedule entirely. I'm Rob Woodfork, and that's D.C. Sports Filtered. The Washington commanders have picked the contracting firms that will build the new Dome Stadium on the old Robert F. Kennedy Jr. site. This will be a joint venture of three companies. There will be locally based builders Clark Construction Group and Smoot Construction. They'll be joined by the Mortensen Company. Now, that company has considerable experience building sports stadiums and arenas all across the U.S. The commanders say they will prioritize hiring local residents to work on the project. Right now, the commanders want to open the new stadium in 2030. Sports on WTOP, brought to you by Amentum, delivering advanced solutions for space and defense men, rabies. with us now. We're talking Nats baseball. Yeah, we're counting down to first pitch. Nationals, they were left for dead late last week after the trade deadline. They had that miserable road trip. They lost seven of eight. They returned home, though, and suddenly, new life. They've won three in a row. They just came off the sweep of the Cincinnati Reds over the weekend, and they look to keep it going tonight as they open a three-game series against the wild card leading Chicago Cubs. And for longtime Nats beat reporter, Mark Zuckerman, maybe it just helps not playing the Braves or Phillies, who as we know are to the... best teams in the league. The Reds not quite so much. It's been nice to see the offense get back on track. It's been nice to see some quality pitching, both out of the rotation and out of the bullpen. This just looked like a better all-around effort. And we'll see how sustainable it is. Tougher challenge again coming up tonight with the Cubs in town. Jake Irving on the mound tonight for the national Shota Imanaga goes for Chicago. James Wood, meanwhile, eligible to return from the injured list as soon as this Friday. And while Wood is progressing from his oblique injury, manager Blake Buterra conceding this afternoon, he'll likely need more time before returning to the lineup. NFL regular season kicks off in just over four weeks. Rams and 49ers, they are set in week one to play the first ever game in Australia. And the teams reportedly going about their travel itineraries a little differently. And you got the 49ers and head coach Kyle Shanahan.

They're going eight days in advance. Get acclimated to the time zone in Australia. They're going to practice there. They're going to set up shop, maybe do a little sight scene. Sean McVeigh's L.A. Rams. The day before, it's fly to Melbourne, put on the pads, play a football game the next day, and then head back to Los Angeles. Wow. In his defense, Sean McVeigh, we'll see how this works out, all right? But remember, last year they played in London. I'll remind you, they played in London against the Jaguars. And in the days leading up to that, they practiced at Camden Yards in Baltimore. That's right. They had played the Ravens. And rather than going... over the Atlantic and settling up in London. They settled in Baltimore for the week. And then they flew to London the day before the game and they beat the Jaguars. Yeah. This is a little further. I was going to say, I mean, even from California, that's 20 hours. I wonder if maybe Sean McVeigh, does he plant him in Hawaii for a few days? Maybe. I don't know. But interesting, eight days versus one day. We'll see how that turns out for that NFC West Battle in Australia. Ben Raby, WTOP sports.