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 of the Texas Gambling Commission, Abbot said that a continuing state prohibition on gambling expansion is in place to protect citizens and he ‘supports it wholeheartedly.’
Abbot’s veto comes in light of news that the state regulator happens to be gathering information on the feasibility of adopting new gambling games in Texas, in particular sports betting and daily fantasy sports. In October, commission administrator director Gary Grief joined up with staff on a mission that is fact-finding Delaware to examine the state’s online gambling operations.
‘In light of constant pressures that are external expand the footprint of gaming in Texas, it’s prompt and necessary that we provide direction on prohibiting all such expansions without express authorization and direction by the Texas Legislature,’ penned Abbot in a letter dated November 9, 2015.
‘Please ensure this intent and direction is strictly enforced among the staff regarding the Texas Lottery Commission.
Please also notify the executive staff and director that any demand to travel to gather information regarding video gaming possibilities that are prohibited in Texas should really be denied.’
Gambling in Texas
Beyond the parimutuel betting at horseracing and dog songs and also the state’s one Indian casino, the only forms of gambling presently legal in Texas will be the state lottery, charitable bingo and raffles.
Even the lottery, which earns $2.2 billion every two years for public education, is under danger and its abolition was debated in the legislature every year since its 1991 inception.
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 associated with the imagination.
A hastily assembled ballot reinstated it.
Opposition in the Legislature
The idea of gambling expansion does not stay well with the conservative and Christian sensibilities of a large part of the legislature, and a bill to liberalize gambling this year had been summarily quashed.
‘that we may serve as a resource to the legislature should they decide to consider these other forms of gaming,’ Texas Lottery spokeswoman Kelly Cripe said of the reasoning behind the recent mission to Delaware though we may not offer these games, we want to be knowledgeable of the industry so.
‘As we continue our mission to generate income for Texas, our company is very mindful and respectful that it could 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.
Fontainebleau Resort Goes on the marketplace for $650 Million
Carl Icahn, that is prepared to market the house he rescued from bankruptcy for a $4 million profit. (Image: businessinsider.com)
Fontainebleau, the big, ambitious $3 billion Vegas Strip megaresort that never ever ended up being, 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 deal.
The one caveat for potential purchasers: you will have to finish building it yourself.
Fontainebleau was one of a few huge developments conceived before the global financial downturn of 2008 that were devastated whenever recession hit throughout the construction stage. The tower was never ever finished, and the resort continues to be only 70 percent complete.
Fontainebleau had grand tips: named for a magnificent chateau that is french was as soon as house to the kings of France, its tower would, at 730-feet, be the tallest in Vegas.
Investment Possibility
But, like experience Atlantic City, no project better symbolizes the financial crash that ravaged the casino industry from 2008 to 2011, during which time Las Vegas had been famously dubbed ‘Ground Zero of the economic downturn.’
Work started regarding 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 financing.
But Vegas is currently on the up, and Ichan obviously thinks that Fontainebleau is no longer a doomed folly to economic shortsightedness, but an investment opportunity that is exciting.
‘I think Las Vegas still has a fair quantity of space to perform,’ said Icahn, who paid around $150 million for Fontainebleau. ‘But I’d rather sell it than take enough time and energy to create it out, which we have been considering doing,’ he told the Wall Street Journal this week.
In the Up
The visitors have actually returned to the city in their droves and room rates have reached record levels. Meanwhile, other jobs that were abandoned throughout the crisis that is economic including the Echelon and the Las Vegas Plaza, have discovered new owners who are prepared to invest in their development.
Across the street to your 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 royal vegas casino pt 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 nevada Review Journal.
‘We’ve come a way that is long. Gaming companies are spending in and renovating properties. Local gaming numbers are beginning showing enhancement. New projects are bringing vibrancy to our community.
I believe the recession is behind us now.’
It’s estimated Fontainebleau would take another two years to perform.
Hacker Group ‘Anonymous’ Targets Terrorists Over Payment Processors
Cyber hacking collective ‘Anonymous’ announced it is pursuing ISIS after the terrorist militants claimed to have killed over 130 individuals in Paris last Friday. (Image: americasfreedomfighters.com)
Call them Terrorist Haters Anonymous, if you shall. However the team that lives up to its name is for once likely to bring down the criminals with their own boy that is bad skills.
Yup, the vigilante collective known as ‘Anonymous’ is going to war, and they are moving in by having a type or kind of cyber-Robin Hood promise this time.
The web hackers posted a video declaration group that is against terrorist State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) over the week-end, claiming the self-proclaimed perpetrators accountable for the attacks in Paris will be ‘hunted down’ and stopped in their cyber tracks.
Online communications, apparently now mainly moved onto gaming platforms in a ‘peer-to-peer’ mode that is inaccessible to law enforcement without acquiring warrants, were the mode that is primary preparing these global and lethal attacks, according to media sources.
Gaming World Knows DDoS Attacks All Too Well
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 on the web gambling payment processors Moneybookers and Neteller, with an untold amount of addresses, emails, telephone numbers, birthdates, and password tips stolen.
Last year, Iranian hackers angered by Sheldon Adelson’s pro-Israel place infiltrated community servers at the billionaire’s Sands Bethlehem resort in Pennsylvania, effectively shutting down the casino. As well as in a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults sent four Internet casinos offline in New Jersey for some 30 minutes july.
Hackers have largely been a disruptive force that costs victims billions of dollars every year to protect, however for now the masterminds are putting their skills to good use by going after ISIS, an organization condemned by all 28 member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Yes, ISIS Tweets
ISIS is a group that is radical resides in the Iraq desert, primarily Ramadi, a city it captured once US forces withdrew from the area. ISIS’ war-ravaged head office isn’t without technology, the guerrillas possessing the capability to distribute its messages and claims of responsibility online, because it has reportedly done regarding the Paris attacks.
Distributed through Twitter, ISIS called the bombings and mass shootings in Paris that left significantly more than 130 dead a ‘blessed attack’ as well as the ‘first of the storm.’
Anonymous responded in its own Internet message, a video clip showing a representative donning the group’s man Fawkes mask saying, ‘Anonymous from all over the globe will hunt you down … We will introduce the operation that is biggest ever against you.
‘ The French individuals are more powerful than you and will emerge of this atrocity even more powerful,’ the hackers concluded.
Consequential Results
The Anonymous group’s wishes to disrupt the web operations of ISIS could be significant. The first line of ISIS recruitment is performed through the Internet, 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 mastered an arena no group that is terrorist conquered before: the burgeoning world of social networking,’ authors Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger wrote in their book on Islamic extremism, ISIS: their state of Terror.
A report in March by the Brookings organization found upwards of 2,000 pro-ISIS Twitter records that were highly active, tweeting an average of 50 messages each day. Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iraq were the top three reported locales of the tweeters, but concerning to Americans is the known fact that the United States was fourth.
Twitter does not reveal why or whenever it chooses to disable an account. ‘Is it ethical to suppress speech that is political even when such speed is repugnant?’ Brookings asks.
Anonymous is planning to answer that question on its terms that are own. Gamblers can only just hope that other such cyber hackers turn their attentions elsewhere as well.