a fear of the wandering dago food truck and women named cynthia and a man named bartholomew as her persists in declaring death to easter sunday because he answers only to.....
Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays
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.
Pope Prohibits Death Penalty and Calls for Its Abolition
In the past, the Catholic Church hadn’t entirely ruled out the use of capital punishment
Pope Francis has emphasized issues of social economic justice over sexual and medical ethics.. PHOTO: TONY GENTILE/REUTERS
ROME— Pope Francis formally strengthened Catholic Church teaching against capital punishment, categorically prohibiting it as an attack on human dignity and calling for its abolition.
The Vatican announced Thursday that the pope had approved revised language for the Catechism of the Catholic Church, an official compendium of doctrine, to state that the death penalty is “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and that the church is working “with determination for its abolition worldwide.”
Up to now, the church hasn’t entirely ruled out the death penalty if it “is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor,” but noted such cases should be extremely rare.
The change is the culmination of growing opposition to the death penalty by the last several popes, but also reflects the priorities of Pope Francis, who has emphasized issues of social and economic justice over sexual and medical ethics, and who late last year suggested that the church had always been wrong about the death penalty.
Some conservative Catholics are likely to object that capital punishment remains at least theoretically permissible under traditional teaching.
Ignatius Press, the English-language publisher of retired Pope Benedict XVI, last year published a study by two academics defending capital punishment on the basis of Catholic theology, philosophy and scripture.
In 2011, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a Catholic, told a law school audience: “If I thought that Catholic doctrine held the death penalty to be immoral, I would resign” from the U.S. Supreme Court.
Catholic countries in Europe have abolished the death penalty, but the pope’s decision could fuel criticism of political leaders elsewhere, including the Philippines, where President Rodrigo Duterte supports restoration of capital punishment.
In justifying the change, the new language cites an “increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes” as well as the development of “more effective systems of detention” which can today protect society from dangerous criminals yet “do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.”
The change follows a speech by Pope Francis last October, in which he called the death penalty “contrary to the Gospel,” and said that the church’s previous sanction and use of “this extreme and inhumane remedy that ignored the primacy of mercy over justice” was “dictated by a mentality more legalistic than Christian.”
This is not the first change to the catechism in the direction of less tolerance for capital punishment. The original edition, published in 1992, while preferring “bloodless means” for the protection of human life, accepted as “well-founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty.”
Five years later, Pope John Paul II changed that language to match his reflections in a wide-ranging encyclical on the value of human life. The 1997 revisions have stood until the latest change by Pope Francis.
Write to Francis X. Rocca at francis.rocca@wsj.com
