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Sunday, May 28, 2017
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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.
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.
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Peter Iwanowicz, executive director of Environmental Advocates of New York, spoke Wednesday at a news conference about amending the state constitution.CreditNathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
ALBANY — The Bill of Rights in the New York State Constitution protects a number of essential liberties. Freedom of worship? Check. The right to assemble? Check. Freedom to divorce? That, too. The right to play bingo and gamble on horses? You bet.
But environmental activists and some lawmakers say that one liberty that is conspicuously absent from the Constitution’s Bill of Rights is the right to a clean environment. Citing recent instances of contaminated water supplies and what they call an assault on the environment by the Trump administration, they are now determined to change that.
“I would think that people would put betting on horses and playing bingo on a par with a right to a healthful environment,” said Peter M. Iwanowicz, executive director of Environmental Advocates of New York, a nonprofit lobbying group based here.
In late April, in a vote timed to commemorate Earth Day, the State Assembly passed a bill 113 to 26 to add a clean-environment amendment to the Bill of Rights, stating simply, “Each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”
The State Senate, where the legislation has several Democratic sponsors, is pondering the bill. To amend the Constitution, the bill needs the support of both chambers in two successive Legislatures. If the legislation passes the Republican-controlled Senate, where its chances are far from certain, it would then have to be approved by the Legislature again in 2019 before being put to voters as a state referendum.
But while supporters embrace the bill’s sweeping language, critics, including the Business Council of New York State, argue that it is so broad that judges could have too much leeway and set environmental policy through their decisions. On Wednesday, the council issued a memo opposing the proposed amendment.
“It’s unneeded,” said Darren Suarez, the Business Council’s director of government affairs. He added that residents struggling with contamination of their drinking water supplies, as in Hoosick Falls, N.Y., “already have multiple means of legal recourse.”
Mr. Suarez was referring to a health emergency in Hoosick Falls, a village near the Vermont border where the public water supply was found to be tainted with high levels of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA. A toxic chemical, it is linked in some studies to an increased risk for cancer, thyroid disease and serious complications during pregnancy.
Last year a federal class-action lawsuit was filed against Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, the owner of a plant that the state said was the source of the PFOA contamination, and Honeywell International, a past owner of the plant.
Children from Hoosick Falls, N.Y., protested last year in Albany about the drinking water in their town, where water wells, at right, were contaminated with high levels of perfluorooctanoic acid.CreditNathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
Mr. Suarez and other business leaders fear that the provision would undermine economic development in the state by holding projects to an unreasonable — and unattainable — level of environmental stewardship. For example, he said, an activist judge could decide that allowable levels of contaminants under state and federal laws did not meet the hazy standard of a “healthful environment.”
“Then we start to go away from hard science and we head to a place where decisions aren’t made on the merits, but on feelings,” Mr. Suarez said.
Advocates for the environment and victims of contaminated water supplies disagree. At a news conference on Wednesday in which lawmakers and supporters of the legislation called for its passage, residents of Hoosick Falls shared their stories.
Silvia Potter, a counselor who has lived in Hoosick Falls for eight years, said she was afraid to use the water, which is now being filtered, for cooking or bathing, even though the state has deemed it safe. “I scrub my toilet and scrub my floor with the filtered water and that’s it,” she said. “I hope Hoosick Falls is a huge wake-up call.”
Several states, including Pennsylvania and Montana, already have similar environmental protections in their constitutions, which environmental groups have used with varying degrees of success to fight polluters and challenge state laws and regulations. In New York, the Constitution, under Article 14, already has language requiring the state to “conserve and protect its natural resources.”
The Delaware Riverkeeper, Maya K. van Rossum, told lawmakers at the news conference how her group and several municipalities had used the environmental clause in Pennsylvania’s Constitution to challenge a pro-fracking law that would have pre-empted local zoning and imposed a gag order on health professionals.
In 2013, Pennsylvania’s highest court rejected provisions of the law, citing Article 1, Section 27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution. Since its passage in a referendum in 1971, the article has guaranteed a “right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values of the environment.”
Ms. van Rossum said the fracking debate had helped revive the little-known provision. “In bringing that litigation,” she said, “not only did we successfully defeat that very devastating piece of legislation, but we breathed life into Article 1, Section 27, of Pennsylvania’s Constitution, which had been ignored for over 40 years.”
Despite the campaign to raise awareness about the proposed amendment in New York, it is unclear whether the Senate will vote on it this session. The legislation is sponsored in the Senate by David Carlucci, a member of the Independent Democratic Conference, a coalition of eight Democrats who have a power-sharing agreement with Republicans. The conference has taken credit for using its leverage to help pass left-leaning legislation.
Mr. Carlucci, whose district includes parts of Rockland and Westchester Counties, said the Constitution needed to be updated to reflect modern-day environmental problems and current politics.
“We are getting hints of what the E.P.A. budget is looking like,” he said, referring to the federal Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump. “We hear they want to cut it by 31 percent and decimate programs to clean up the Great Lakes and get PCBs out of the Hudson River. We have to be pre-emptive.”
NAME. PHONE NUMBER. EMAIL ADDRESS. Legislator Kevin J. McCaffrey (R). (631) 854-1100. Kevin. McCaffrey@suffolkcountyny.gov. Peggy Allar. (631) 854-1100. Peggy.Allar@suffolkcountyny.gov. kevin mccaffre president of teamster local 707 does not believe members and bettors have the right to do as the wish on sny sunday of the year
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.
one up the old man and see that corpses do not pile up in canada and beyond for failure to use bcg as per the work of faustmanlab.org, pubmed.org faustman dl, pubmed.org ristori + bcg, uspto.gov inventor search faustman
Make canada great again by improving on the failures of insulin
in the face of bcg
Michael Bliss, Historian Who Dispelled Myths of Insulin’s Discovery, Dies at 76
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Michael Bliss, a Canadian historian whose work upset the commonly held wisdom surrounding the discovery of insulin.CreditReg Innell/Toronto Star, via Getty Images
Michael Bliss, a distinguished Canadian historian whose unraveling of the story behind the discovery of insulin overturned the widely accepted telling of it and brought international attention to his work, died on May 18 in Toronto. He was 76.
His daughter Sally Bliss said the cause was complications of vasculitis, an inflammatory blood vessel disease.
Professor Bliss was already well established as a historian of Canadian business and politics when he turned his attention to the discovery of insulin, the hormone that transformed diabetesfrom an effective death sentence into a manageable condition. He called the discovery “something like salvation,” particularly for children with diabetes.
The discovery was made in 1921 by a somewhat improbable research team at the University of Toronto, against a backdrop of internal feuding that only intensified after the Nobel Prize was awarded two years later to just two of the four principal researchers.
Professor Bliss, who taught at the university from 1968 to 2006, published “The Discovery of Insulin” in 1982. His account upset the commonly held wisdom that the discovery had mainly been the work of two inexperienced researchers from the countryside: Dr. Frederick Banting, a surgeon, and Charles Best, a recent college graduate who had yet to enter medical school.
The Nobel was awarded only to Dr. Banting and J. J. R. Macleod, the head of the university’s physiology department. Most earlier accounts viewed Dr. Macleod as undeserving of the honor, placing him on an overseas holiday while Dr. Banting and Mr. Best labored away.
But using newly released documents — including lab notes and contemporaneous papers that the university had long suppressed to avoid embarrassing the researchers — Professor Bliss detailed a far more complex, if no less acrimonious, story, revealing that the discovery was indeed a team effort by the three and, to varying degrees, others.
While chronicling the infighting among the researchers, “The Discovery of Insulin” also illuminated the science of endocrinology. Shelley McKellar, a professor of medical history at Western University in London, Ontario, who studied under Professor Bliss, said the book, like all of his work, was written in clear, nonacademic prose that made the subject accessible to the general public.
“Deep down he was a writer,” said Professor McKellar. “He always tried to disseminate his research to the widest possible audience.” She noted that he would speak not only to medical conferences but also to women’s social clubs in church basements.
In an essay he wrote in 2004, Professor Bliss said his shift to medical history had been due in part to his family — his father was a small-town doctor on the shore of Lake Erie in southwestern Ontario — as well as “a kind of midlife change of pace.”
He chose the development of insulin as a subject partly because earlier accounts, he found, were inadequate. He was also inspired, he said, by his reading on Arctic exploration.
That “raised for me a methodological interest in the possibility of very detailed, day-to-day recreation of past discrete events,” he wrote, adding, “If you could virtually retrace the footsteps of Arctic explorers could you virtually redo the insulin experiments?”
John William Michael Bliss was born in Leamington, Ontario, on Jan. 18, 1941, to Dr. Quartus Bliss and the former Anne Crowe. He grew up in Kingsville, a farming and fishing town just to the west. In early childhood, Michael, as he was known, would join his father when he was called out to perform his duties as the local coroner. For a while, he considered following his father into medicine.
But that thought was dispelled one weekend when the police came by their house with a drunk who been in a brawl and needed stitches. The man was ushered into his father’s home office.
“As I sat and watched on that Sunday afternoon in his consulting room,” Professor Bliss wrote, “with blood and alcohol fumes everywhere, reflecting on my own complete disinterest in and lack of all manual skills, I decided that this was not what I wanted to do in life.”
He met his future wife, Elizabeth Haslam, at a high school dance in Harrow, Ontario, another farm town. They married in 1963, and both studied at the University of Toronto. Mrs. Bliss, a retired teacher, survives him. Besides their daughter Sally, he is also survived by two other children, Jamie and Laura Bliss; a brother, Robert, and four grandchildren.
Robert Bothwell, another historian at the University of Toronto, said that Professor Bliss had favored writing his books — 14 in all — as expansively as possible. “A Canadian Millionaire” (1978), for example, is nominally a biography of Joseph Flavelle, a Toronto businessman who built his fortune starting in the meatpacking business. But the book is also a tour of the meatpacking trade and Toronto politics in the early 20th century, a portrait of a clique of Methodists who dominated business in Toronto, and a discussion of Canada’s role in World War I.
Professor Bliss had a sometimes uncomfortable relationship with other historians who studied Canada. Unlike some of their works, his business histories, while revealing flaws in both the character and practices of his subjects, were generally sympathetic toward them and business in general. And while he maintained that he was suspicious of all ideologies, his politics were decidedly conservative, if not in a partisan sense, during a time when Canadian history was more commonly viewed from the left.
Professor Bliss was among a small minority of Canadian intellectuals who favored the talks that led to a free-trade agreement between the United States and Canada in 1988, a forerunner of the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1993.
Until his retirement, he wrote often provocative opinion articles for newspapers and appeared frequently on radio and television, in addition to publishing books.
Last year, in a video interview recorded for his induction into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, Professor Bliss said that by the end of his career he had considered himself almost entirely a medical historian, and that he believed that his medical books were his most important works.
Among them are “Banting: A Biography” (1984); “William Osler: A Life in Medicine” (1999), about the renowned Canadian internist who helped found Johns Hopkins Hospital; and “Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery” (2005), about the pioneering American neurosurgeon and writer (whose own biography of Osler won a Pulitzer Prize).
“Medicine,” Professor Bliss said, “is a wonder that takes you from small town Canada to the Nobel Archives.”
Prof Michael Bliss CMHF 2016Video by cdnmedhall
Correction: May 26, 2017
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to Dr. William Osler, the subject of a biography by Professor Bliss. He was an internist, not a surgeon.
