Kim Jong Un’s brother was an informant for the CIA: report says andrew cuomo answers to a higher authoruty than ny const art 1 sec 3 and if you want to bet great racing watchout
Claude Solnik
Long Island Business News
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Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
Kim Jong Un’s half-brother was working as a CIA informant before his broad-daylight assassination in 2017, a report says.
The “nexus” — as one source called it — between the US spy agency and the dictator’s brother, Kim Jong Nam, was revealed Monday by the Wall Street Journal, which cited “a person knowledgeable about the matter.”
Little is known about Kim Jong Nam’s alleged snitching, only that he met with CIA operatives on multiple occasions, the Journal reports.
The North Korean leader’s half-brother had been exiled and living on-and-off in the Chinese enclave of Macau when he began making contact with the CIA and other security services across the world, according to the Journal’s source.
US officials, however, told the newspaper it’s highly unlikely that he knew any top secrets or details about the Hermit Kingdom’s inner workings.
The Journal’s report comes as tensions continue to simmer between the Trump administration and Pyongyang. A February summit in Hanoi that featured both Kim Jong Un and President Trump was the last time the two sides met and talked, but the discussions fell through.
A book that is set to be published on Tuesday by Washington Post Beijing bureau chief Anna Fifield — titled “The Great Successor” — will reportedly outline Kim Jong Nam’s ties to the CIA.
Fifield described his relationship with his brother to The Japan Times over the weekend, and also spoke about their parents and relatives.
“Kim Jong Nam and his cousin, Ri Nam Ok, were like birds in a cage, their movements severely restricted and their life enveloped in paranoia,” explained Fifield. “All of them had to live in varying degrees of secrecy but all of them were allowed to travel and live a good life outside. For some — like Kim Jong Nam’s mother — that was a perk of being in the royal family. But, for others, it must have opened their eyes to an alternative. But what I find most interesting is that many of them are still in some sort of cahoots with the regime. They were in privileged positions and seemed unable to completely let go of the benefits that came with that. Either way, we can see that this is an extremely dysfunctional family.”
According to Fifield, “everyone related to Kim Jong Nam has gone to ground since his assassination.”
“Understandably so,” she told the Japan Times. “The men in this family in particular have reason to fear what might happen to them. The Kim family claims legitimacy in part on its supposed ‘Paektu bloodline’ — the idea that the family descended from the mountain that is the mythical home of the Korean people. Therefore anyone — or rather, in North Korean hierarchy, any man — from this family could theoretically claim the right to the throne and be a threat to Kim Jong Un.”
Nam was murdered on Feb. 13, 2017 at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia. Two women were later arrested for the mid-day killing, which involved them smearing a deadly nerve agent on Nam’s face as he walked through the airport.
One of the women was released from jail last month for good behavior after copping a plea deal that reduced her charges to causing injury. The other was let go back in March.
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