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The businessman shaped Dallas into an NBA force after years in the wilderness. But problems with the team only worsened when he sold upThe year 2000 cracked open like a glow stick, flooding Dallas with new money – and a new Mavericks owner, who had made his money selling his streaming site just before the dot-com crash. Like the 1990s Mavs, Mark Cuban wasn’t polished – and he sure as hell wasn’t subtle. He was brash and argumentative, clashed with refs, and clapped too hard whenever Dirk Nowitzki buried a three. The internet age, in the form of Cuban, crashed courtside when he bought the team for $285m. Gone was the era of distant owners watching occasional games from the executive boxes: the fan was in control of the team now. Cuban had hacked reality.Cuban’s thesis was simple: never play by their rules. The Mavs were his start-up. He improved nutrition, upgraded hotels for road games, bought a team plane, filled lockers with PlayStations, and fought the NBA’s lawyers with the defiance of a rapper clapping off hundos in a strip club. This went against the NBA’s old boys’ club. For all his dot-com cache, Cuban was punk in practice. Continue reading...
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US president talks of low tariff to give pharmaceutical firms a year or so to build, and then making it ‘very high’Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on pharmaceutical products and semiconductors as soon as 1 August, the latest deadline for the introduction of his “reciprocal” levies on individual countries.The US president told reporters late on Tuesday the taxes on drug imports could be announced “probably at the end of the month, and we’re going to start off with a low tariff and give the pharmaceutical companies a year or so to build, and then we’re going to make it a very high tariff”. Continue reading...
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Judge rules Trump’s executive order discriminates against trans people and violates their constitutional rightsA US judge has temporarily blocked federal prisons from transferring transgender women to men’s facilities and barring their access to hormone therapy, halting one of Donald Trump’s executive orders seeking to erode trans rights behind bars.A lawsuit filed last week by three incarcerated trans women challenged Trump’s anti-trans order, which directed the US bureau of prisons to make sure “males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers” and that no federal funds go to gender-affirming treatment or procedures for people in custody. Continue reading...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/05/incarcerated-trans-women
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In Bend, residents have been getting a chuckle out of seeing googly eyes stuck on installations in roundaboutsGoogly eyes have been appearing on sculptures around the central Oregon city of Bend, delighting many residents and sparking a viral sensation covered widely by news outlets and featured on a popular late-night talk show.On social media, the city shared photos of googly eyes on installations in the middle of roundabouts that make up its so-called “Roundabout Art Route.” One photo shows googly eyes placed on a sculpture of two deer, while another shows them attached to a sphere. It’s not yet known who has been putting them on the sculptures. Continue reading...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/13/oregon-googly-eyes-art