Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban purchased an entire, tiny — and virtually empty — Texas town.

An abandoned strip club and vacant mobile home park are about all that's still standing in the 76.8-acre community of Mustang, which is about 65 miles south of American Airlines Center, home of Cuban's NBA franchise.

"Did it to help out a friend. No plans yet!" Cuban said in an email to NBC News on Friday.

The community had been on the market for about four years as principal owner Marty Price fell ill and wanted to sell, according to Mike Turner, president of Dallas real estate firm J. Elmer Turner.

Turner declined to reveal the final sales price but conceded it closed last month for less than the original asking price of $4 million.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mavericks-owner-mark-cuban-buys-entire-empty-town-mustang-texas-rcna7518
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Maybe we could move there and fill it up with Democrats. Just a thought.....

A white man shot his Black neighbor in Missouri, claiming self-defense. Neighbors tell a different story.

The fatal shooting of a Black man in a trailer park is rocking a rural community in Missouri as neighbors who say they witnessed the killing dispute the police narrative of events.

Justin King, a 28-year-old Black and Filipino man, was shot Nov. 3 at 11:45 a.m. in the small town of Bourbon, located about 73 miles southwest of St. Louis.

Police say he was shot by the owner of a home he was trying to break into, but witnesses and family members say he was shot in "cold blood" by a man he called his friend.

King succumbed to his wounds at the scene. The 42-year-old white neighbor who shot him was taken into custody and later released.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/white-man-shot-black-neighbor-missouri-claiming-self-defense-neighbors-rcna6330

A plumber was working on a toilet at Joel Osteen’s church. Then a trove of cash and checks fell out of the wall.

A plumber doing maintenance work at pastor Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church stumbled across checks and cash hidden in a wall — a discovery that may yield clues to an unsolved burglary reported by the congregation seven years ago.

The unexpected find was revealed Thursday when the worker called in to a Houston radio morning show that had invited listeners to share stories about valuable items they had randomly found over the years.

The caller — who has only been identified as “Justin” — said he was on a job at the megachurch Nov. 10 when he made the stunning find.

“There was a loose toilet in the wall, and we removed the tile,” he told George Lindsey on 100.3 the Bull’s morning show. “We went to go remove the toilet, and I moved some insulation away and about 500 envelopes fell out of the wall.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/12/03/joel-osteen-lakewood-plumber-cash-toilet/
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Who else thinks Joel (or someone working directly for him) stuffed this in the wall and filed a false report? Raise your hand.

A follower of Romana Didulo, a woman who claims to be the Queen of Canada, was arrested in Laval, Quebec, after allegedly making threats about his daughter's school.

The arrest comes after Didulo, a QAnon influencer with over 70,000 followers online, was detained by the RCMP and a search warrant was executed on her home after she made a post calling for the military of Canada to “shoot to kill” people facilitating children being vaccinated.

The post was made inside a private chat room for Canadian “duck hunters,” the term Didulo and her followers use to describe people chosen to carry out arrests and violence. The post featured the details of his daughters' school, which was offering vaccination to their students. He wrote “time to go hunting bang bang” at the end of the post. The post has since been removed; it is unknown why or who took it down.

The comments had been previously reported by VICE World News and the CBC. In a press release, Laval police said they were alerted to the post by the CBC article.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3abbg9/follower-of-qanon-influencer-who-claims-to-be-canadas-queen-arrested-over-school-threats
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Why haven't they arrested HER?

The parents of a teenager suspected of a deadly school shooting have denied charges of involuntary manslaughter following their arrest on Saturday.

James and Jennifer Crumbley were found hiding in a Detroit basement having failed to show up in court on Friday.

The judge set bail at $500,000 each after agreeing with prosecutors that the Crumbleys posed a flight risk.

They are accused of ignoring warning signs before their son's alleged rampage.

Prosecutors say Ethan Crumbley, 15, used his father's gun to shoot classmates in the nearby Michigan town of Oxford, killing four and wounding seven.

The Crumbleys' lawyers said that the pair had intended to turn themselves in to the authorities on Saturday morning, according to US media.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59532845
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View from across the pond. In my view, they act much like pet owners who don't train their pet, deny responsibility for its misbehavior, and dump it at the shelter when the misbehavior get too much for them

Over the past 14 years, the Central Intelligence Agency has secretly amassed credible evidence that at least 10 of its employees and contractors committed sexual crimes involving children.

Though most of these cases were referred to US attorneys for prosecution, only one of the individuals was ever charged with a crime. Prosecutors sent the rest of the cases back to the CIA to handle internally, meaning few faced any consequences beyond the possible loss of their jobs and security clearances. That marks a striking deviation from how sex crimes involving children have been handled at other federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Administration. CIA insiders say the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets.

The revelations are contained in hundreds of internal agency reports obtained by BuzzFeed News through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

One employee had sexual contact with a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old. He was fired. A second employee purchased three sexually explicit videos of young girls, filmed by their mothers. He resigned. A third employee estimated that he had viewed up to 1,400 sexually abusive images of children while on agency assignments. The records do not say what action, if any, the CIA took against him. A contractor who arranged for sex with an undercover FBI agent posing as a child had his contract revoked.

Only one of the individuals cited in these documents was charged with a crime. In that case, as in the only previously known case of a CIA staffer being charged with child sexual crimes, the employee was also under investigation for mishandling classified material.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/cia-employees-sex-crimes-children-secret-files-foia

Cheri Burness' dog was the first to signal something was wrong with their tap water. He stopped drinking it two weeks ago. Then Burness started feeling stomach cramps. Her 12-year-old daughter was nauseous.

"It was just getting worse every day," said Burness, whose husband is in the Navy.

Their family is among hundreds of military families living near Pearl Harbor with similar complaints after the Navy's water system somehow became contaminated by petroleum. The problems have afflicted one of the most important Navy bases in the world, home to submarines, ships and the commander of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific region. The issues may even threaten one of Honolulu's most important aquifers and water sources.

The Navy said Thursday that tests had identified petroleum in its Red Hill well which taps into an aquifer near the base. Rear Adm. Blake Converse, Pacific Fleet deputy commander, told a town hall meeting the Navy took this well offline on Sunday because it was nearest well to affected housing areas.

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/03/1061194511/pearl-harbor-tap-water-petroleum-fuel

The first thing I thought about when I saw the news of the latest school shooting, which left four teenagers dead in Michigan, was my younger kid. He is joyful and thoughtful, and he worries. This child was excited to go to middle school because: It has metal detectors!

In his beautiful mind, metal detectors = a promise that he won’t die if another child wants to pull out a semiautomatic weapon that his dad allegedly bought at a store nearby, maybe during a Black Friday gun sale.

How would I explain away this one, like I had tried before? How could I help him feel like his mother was doing her job — protecting him — when I knew I couldn’t, really?

Some might point out that it’s a very small population of kids who have been privy to the particular horror of school shootings. Well, sort of. This week, four (so far) children out of 7 million in this nation are dead, and a handful are grievously injured. But the ripples go far and wide. Our kids are traumatized. We parents are traumatized. People without kids are traumatized.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/12/03/school-shooting-trauma/

Last week in the stray jail we had a sibling pair of kittens, one blue semi-longhair, one blue and white. They're actually teenagers, looking to be about 6 or 7 months old. Very nice kittens, actually, brother and sister. Today I walked in and did a complete double-take, because in the kennel above them was a nearly identical pair, one blue, one blue and white. "Who," I demanded of Natalie, who runs the place, "went to the copier and printed these kittens?" She looked at the four of them and burst out laughing. "Oh my god, you're right!"

The upshot is that after we stopped laughing, they all got names. The "originals" are Big Blue (after IBM) and Apple, and the "copies" are Xerox and Canon. Unfortunately, since I don't do Flickr or Photobucket, I can't show you their pictures.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to reestablish a World War II-era civilian military force that he, not the Pentagon, would control.

DeSantis pitched the idea Thursday as a way to further support the Florida National Guard during emergencies, like hurricanes. The Florida National Guard has also played a vital role during the pandemic in administering Covid-19 tests and distributing vaccines.

But in a nod to the growing tension between Republican states and the Biden administration over the National Guard, DeSantis also said this unit, called the Florida State Guard, would be "not encumbered by the federal government." He said this force would give him "the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible." DeSantis is proposing bringing it back with a volunteer force of 200 civilians, and he is seeking $3.5 million from the state legislature in startup costs to train and equip them.

The move by DeSantis comes on the heels of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's directive warning that National Guard members who refuse to get vaccinated against the coronavirus will have their pay withheld and barred from training. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, had requested an exemption for guard members in his state, which Austin denied.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/02/politics/florida-state-guard-desantis/index.html
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DeSatan is a nazi. Believe it.