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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.
Patriarch Bartholomew: Ecological crisis caused by ‘human interference’
- Filipe DominguesJun 8, 2018
Pope Francis presents a gift to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople during a meeting in the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican May 26. (Credit: Paul Haring/CNS.)
ROME - One of the greatest allies of Pope Francis in promoting international initiatives that defend the environment is the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I.
The spiritual leader of the Orthodox Church, Bartholomew has been promoting a Christian theology of the environment for decades.
“Our churches are called to offer alternative models of life based on an approach of the human being in his relationship with God, as a creature longing for eternal life, living in fraternity and love with the other,” Bartholomew said in an exclusive interview with Filipe Domingues for the Brazilian newspaper O São Paulo, which Crux shares with permission.
Francis has developed a close relationship with Bartholomew and acknowledged his influence on his 2015 ecological encyclical Laudato Si’.
Domingues conducted his interview with the patriarch shortly after his visit to Rome in May.
Here is Crux’s exclusive English version of the exchange.
Domingues: Your Holiness, a few days ago, you visited Rome and met Pope Francis. Also you were a keynote speaker at a conference in which your speech was titled “A Common Christian Agenda for the Common Good.” What are the fruits of this visit?
Bartholomew: Every meeting with Pope Francis is another opportunity for us to re-register the good relations between our two churches and our will to continue the path towards unity. It is the encounter of two brothers, the successors of Peter and Andrew the First-Called, and every such event symbolizes our common heritage, but above all the common responsibility we share as pastors for the future of Christianity.
As you see in the title of our speech we come across the word “common” twice. Church itself is the place of the “common” - an event of sharing, of love and openness, a “communion of relations.”
Today humanity is facing a serious crisis, [including] its social outcomes, on a global scale. As we stated in our address, “this worldwide crisis is a ‘crisis of solidarity,’ an ongoing process of ‘desolidarization,’ which puts the very future of humanity at risk. It is our deep conviction, that the future of humanity is related to the resistance against this crisis and the establishment of a culture of solidarity.”
Our churches are called to offer alternative models of life based on an approach of a human being in his relation to God, as a creature longing for eternal life, living in fraternity and love with the other. God, as we mentioned, is present, wherever love and solidarity exist. Our churches resist injustice and all powers that undermine social cohesion by putting forth the social content of the Gospel.
It is Pope Francis’s and our common belief that present ecological problems have to be approached in connection with the contemporary social crisis. It is this spirit that our Common Message with Pope Francis on the ‘World Day of Creation’ (Sept 1st, 2018) expresses.
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