Not on his watch: Texas Governor Greg Abbott offers a resounding ‘no’ to online gambling.
Texas officials must cease their line of inquiry into legalizing online gambling, Governor Greg Abbot said this week.
In a page to the Chairman associated with the Texas Gambling Commission, Abbot said that a continuing state prohibition on gambling expansion is in place to protect residents and he ‘supports it wholeheartedly.’
Abbot’s veto comes in light of news that the state regulator happens to be information that is gathering the feasibility of adopting new gambling games in Texas, in particular recreations betting and daily fantasy sports. In October, payment professional manager Gary Grief joined up with staff on a mission that is fact-finding Delaware to examine their state’s online gambling operations.
‘In light of constant pressures that are external expand the footprint of gaming in Texas, it is prompt and necessary that I provide way on prohibiting all such expansions without express authorization and direction by the Texas Legislature,’ composed Abbot in a page dated November 9, 2015.
‘Please ensure this direction and intent is strictly enforced among the staff of the Texas Lottery Commission.
Please additionally notify the administrator director and staff that any demand to travel to gather information about video gaming possibilities which can be prohibited in Texas must be denied.’
The only forms of gambling currently legal in Texas are the state lottery, charitable bingo and raffles beyond the parimutuel betting at horseracing and dog tracks and the state’s one Indian casino.
Perhaps the lottery, which brings in $2.2 billion every two years for public education, is under risk and its abolition is debated in the legislature every since its 1991 inception year.
In 2013, lawmakers voted by 81-65 to scrap the lottery, before realizing that plugging that $2.2 billion hole with raffles and bingo may be a stretch of the imagination.
A hastily put together ballot reinstated it.
The concept of gambling expansion does perhaps not sit well with the conservative and Christian sensibilities of a large area of the legislature, and a bill to liberalize gambling this year ended up being summarily quashed.
‘Though we might not offer these games, we want to be knowledgeable of the industry to make certain that we might serve as a resource to the legislature should they decide to start thinking about these other forms of gaming,’ Texas Lottery spokeswoman Kelly Cripe said of the reasoning behind the recent objective to Delaware.
‘As we continue our mission to build revenue for Texas, we have been very mindful and respectful so it may be the Texas Legislature that sets policy.’
However, this week Cripe told the Dallas Morning News that her organization would adhere to the governor’s wishes.
Carl Icahn, who is prepared to sell the home he rescued from bankruptcy for a $4 million revenue. (Image: businessinsider.com)
Fontainebleau, the big, ambitious $3 billion Las Vegas Strip megaresort that never had been, is up for sale.
Carl Icahn, the billionaire raider that is corporate rescued the unfinished project from bankruptcy in 2010, is asking $650 million for the property, based on CBRE Group, which has been hired to broker the offer.
The one caveat for potential buyers: you shall have to finish building it yourself.
Fontainebleau was one of several huge developments conceived before the global financial downturn of 2008 that were devastated whenever recession hit during the construction stage. The tower was never ever completed, and the resort remains only 70 percent complete.
Fontainebleau had grand ideas: named for the magnificent chateau that is french was once house to the kings of France, its tower would, at 730-feet, be the tallest in Vegas.
But, like experience Atlantic City, no project better symbolizes the financial crash that ravaged the casino industry from 2008 to 2011, during which time vegas had been famously dubbed ‘Ground Zero of the economic downturn.’
Work started in the property in 2007. Developers Fontainebleau Resorts of Miami, invested $2 billion before being forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, as lenders, spooked by the depression that is economic bailed on the project.
In April 2009, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase, canceled $770 million in construction funding.
But Vegas is now on the up, and Ichan plainly believes that Fontainebleau is not any longer a doomed folly to economic shortsightedness, but an investment opportunity that is exciting.
‘I think Las Vegas nevertheless has an amount that is fair of to run,’ said Icahn, who paid around $150 million for Fontainebleau. ‘But I’d rather sell it than take the time and energy to build it out, which we have been considering doing,’ he told the Wall Street Journal this week.
The visitors have actually came back to the city in their droves and room rates have reached record levels. Meanwhile, other tasks that were abandoned throughout the economic crisis, including the Echelon and the nevada Plaza, have discovered new owners who’re ready to invest in their development.
Next door towards the Fontainebleau, the Frontier, which closed down early in the day this is to be redeveloped into an extension of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s Convention Center District year. The future instantly looks bright for the end that is north of Strip.
‘Las Vegas did not just have recession, it had a depression,’ John Knott, executive vice president of CBRE Las Vegas told the Las Vegas Review Journal.
‘We’ve come a good way. Gaming companies are investing in and properties that are renovating. Local gaming numbers are starting showing improvement. New projects are bringing vibrancy to our community.
We believe the recession is behind us now.’
It’s estimated Fontainebleau would simply take another couple of years to accomplish.
Cyber hacking collective ‘Anonymous’ announced it is going after ISIS following the militants that are terrorist to have killed over 130 individuals in Paris last Friday. (Image: americasfreedomfighters.com)
Call them Terrorist Haters Anonymous, if you will. But the team that lives up to its name is for once likely to bring down the bad guys with their own bad boy hacking abilities.
Yup, the vigilante collective known as ‘Anonymous’ is going to war, and they’re planning with a kind of cyber-Robin Hood promise this time.
The net hackers posted a video declaration group that is against terrorist State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) on the week-end, claiming the self-proclaimed perpetrators accountable for the assaults in Paris will be ‘hunted down’ and stopped in their cyber songs.
Online communications, apparently now mostly moved onto gaming platforms in a ‘peer-to-peer’ mode that is inaccessible to police force without acquiring warrants, were the mode that is primary planning these global and life-threatening attacks, based on media sources.
The gambling community has also become familiar with other (often unidentified) proficient computer hackers disrupting operations at both land-based and online casinos while obviously no one would mind if Anonymous succeeds at disabling its victims and greatly hindering their operations.
In 2009 and 2010, two separate incidents compromised popular online gambling payment processors Moneybookers and Neteller, with an untold number of addresses, emails, phone numbers, birthdates, and password hints stolen.
Last year, Iranian hackers angered by Sheldon Adelson’s pro-Israel position infiltrated network servers during the billionaire’s Sands Bethlehem resort in Pennsylvania, effectively shutting down the casino. Plus in July, a number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults sent four Internet casinos offline in nj for some 30 moments.
Hackers have largely been a force that is disruptive costs victims vast sums of bucks every year to protect, but also for now the masterminds are putting their skills to good usage by going after ISIS, an organization condemned by all 28 member states regarding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
ISIS is a group that is radical resides into the Iraq desert, primarily Ramadi, a city it captured once US forces withdrew from the area. ISIS’ war-ravaged headquarters isn’t without technology, the guerrillas possessing the capability to distribute its messages and claims of duty online, as it has reportedly done about the Paris attacks.
Distributed through Twitter, ISIS called the bombings and mass shootings in Paris that left more than 130 dead a ‘blessed attack’ plus the ‘first of the storm.’
Anonymous responded in its own Internet message, a video showing an agent donning the group’s Guy Fawkes mask saying, ‘Anonymous from all around the globe will hunt you down … we’ll introduce the operation that is biggest ever against you.
‘ The French people are stronger than you and will turn out of this atrocity even more powerful,’ the hackers concluded.
The Anonymous collective’s wishes to disrupt the online operations of ISIS might be significant. The line that is first of recruitment is performed through online, the team keeping a 24/7 social media presence that depends on its sympathetic followers to distribute its communications and viewpoints.
‘As part of its quest to terrorize the world, ISIS has learned an arena no group that is terrorist conquered before: the burgeoning globe of social media,’ writers Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger wrote inside their book on Islamic extremism, ISIS: hawaii of Terror.
A report in March by the Brookings organization found upwards of 2,000 pro-ISIS Twitter reports that have been highly active, tweeting an average of 50 communications each day. Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iraq were the top three stated locales of the tweeters, but concerning to Americans is the known fact that the usa was fourth.
Twitter does not reveal why or when it chooses to disable a free account. ‘Is it ethical to suppress speech that is political even when such rate is repugnant?’ Brookings asks.
Anonymous is planning to answer that concern on its own terms. Gamblers can simply hope that other such cyber hackers turn their attentions elsewhere as well.