General News
Meropi Kyriacou Honored as TNH Educator of the Year
NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.
ATHENS – With Europe’s largest casino being built on nearby Cyprus – where temporary casinos are luring big crowds – Greece’s casino sector is struggling even as the government plans to expand them to the tourist islands of Santorini, Mykonos and Crete.
The number of visitors, revenue and profits fell in the first half of 2018, the business newspaper Naftemporiki said, with the sector also being hard hit from past arrears and some unable to catch up on back pay to workers or meet social security and tax obligations.
There were 1.333 million visitors to casinos in the first six months, down from 1.364 million in the same period for 2017, a drop of 2.26 percent.
The “total casino drop”, the revenue benchmark used in the gaming industry, was 740.5 million euros ($845.84 million,) falling from 754.2 million euros ($861.48 million) in the first half of 2017, a decrease of 1.81 percent.
In terms of the “total casino win” figure, the total was 116.1 million euros ($132.62 million,) down from 120 million euros ($137.07 million,) down 3.23 percent.
Mont Parnes’ Regency had a slight increase in visitors while Thessaloniki’s Hyatt Regency was up by 8.13 percent and Corfu was up by 1.9 percent but Halkidiki prefecture’s Porto Carras casino plunged 43.3 percent and another in Rio, outside Patras, was off 18.29 percent and a 12.2 percent drop for the debt-troubled resort city of Loutraki, west of Athens.
Late last year, gaming licenses for Santorini, Mykonos and Crete were put into a draft bill tabled in Parliament, while another six casinos already in operation would be allowed to move, including the only one around Athens, the Hyatt Regency-run Mont Parnes atop Mt. Parnitha.
The bill would also allow the relocation of casinos in Thessaloniki, Loutraki, Rio (outside the western port city of Patras), Alexandroupolis, in the extreme northeast, and Florina, close to the border with Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM).
A government report said the goal, besides bringing in cold cash, would be to tie gambling to tourists, to reduce the state’s share in licensed casinos’ gross profits, to impose a unified coefficient for the state’s stake in such concessions and to promote the “casino resort” model, one linked to shopping and hotels.
A casino is also planned for the long-delayed development of the abandoned Hellenikon International Airport site on Athens’ coast but major competition is looking in the form of a 550-million euro ($628.4 million) casino to be built on Cyprus by Hong Kong billionaire Lawrence Ho.
Under the draft bill, the semi-autonomous Hellenic Gaming Commission is given greater jurisdiction and acquires a decisive role in licensing and regulating casinos in the country.
NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza (AP) — An international team of doctors visiting a hospital in central Gaza was prepared for the worst.
ATHENS - The tragedy of the Tempi train collision is a much greater issue than an opportunity for parties to table a motion of censure against the government, but the opposition parties used it anyway "to turn society's pain into a tool to strike at the government and me personally," Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Thursday night in parliament.
ATHENS - PASOK-KINAL leader Nikos Androulakis, speaking at the Hellenic Parliament on Thursday, emphasized that there is "an established belief among the Greek people" that the government "operates as a well-oiled machine of corruption, cover-up, and propaganda.
ATHENS — Greece’s center-right government survived a motion of no-confidence late Thursday that was brought by opposition parties over its handling of the country’s deadliest rail disaster a year ago.
ASTORIA – Greek Minister of the Interior Niki Kerameus offered an informative presentation on postal voting in the upcoming European Union elections for Greek citizens in a well-attended event held at the St.