In the Ukraine, the Ministry of Finance has begun a public consultation process on its proposals for the regulation of casinos and gambling advertising and has set a deadline for responses of July 9. According to numerous media reports, the government’s propositions would require operators to have at least USD 1.5 million in capital before opening a casino and lay out exactly what games may be played in the Eastern European nation.

Chicago (Reuters) - The Kansas Supreme Court ruled on Friday that a gambling law allowing state-owned casinos and slot parlors is constitutional, upholding a previous ruling on the law. The case was filed in 2007 by former Kansas Attorney General Paul Morrison on behalf of the state in an attempt to test the law's constitutionality and clear any potential legal hurdles. The ruling means plans for casinos and slots owned by the state can go forward.

Tove Paule, President of the Norwegian Sports Association, has urged the government to allow state-owned gaming operator Norsk Tipping to offer online poker along the lines of that offered by Svenska Spel. Paule told Norwegian radio that a substantial amount of money flows out of the country to foreign online gaming companies, costing Norwegian sports and culture billions of Krone in potential contributions.

Lawmakers failed to agree on setting a clear definition of illegal Internet gambling to go along with a ban on online betting passed in 2006. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department have been unable to finalize rules to implement the ban because Congress didn’t clearly define online gambling when it passed legislation less than two years ago. The House Financial Services Committee rejected a bill Wednesday that would have prohibited the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve...

The Kansas Supreme Court said today it will issue its ruling Friday on whether the state's expanded gambling law is constitutional. The law enacted last year allows four casinos that are owned and operated by the Kansas Lottery. A Shawnee County District Court judge upheld the statute in February. At issue, the Associated Press reported, is whether what the Legislature's definition of "state-owned and operated" casinos are that.

State-owned broadcaster TV2 has found a loophole in the national gaming laws that allows it to provide cash payouts to winners of its online computer games. Although the courts have upheld national gaming agency Danske Spil's monopoly on the 11 billion kroner gambling industry, TV2's games are classified as games of skill -- based on skill rather than on chance -- and are not covered by national gaming laws.

Finnish government agreed on a bill to amend current gambling legislation to protect the under aged. The bill would increase the age limit for using gambling machines to 18. The proposal would include a one-year transition period implementation of the new age-limit for some automatic gambling machines. Currently the age limit is 15 for using gambling machines and participating in games of chance provided by Veikkaus, the state betting and lottery organization.

Internet gambling and betting regulation is the aim of a new project which is being analyzed by the government and the autonomous communities in Spain. A meeting of the Sectoral Gambling Commission, comprised by representatives of Ministry of the Interior, the State Secretary of the Information Society, of the Tax Agency the National Entity of Lotteries and Bets of the State (ONLAE) and the communities.

Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern has signalled his intention to liberalise the State's gambling laws by legalising casinos and creating a new regulatory authority for all forms of gaming. In his first comments on the issue since becoming Minister, Mr Ahern told The Irish Times that existing laws on gambling were "past their sell-by date". However, he promised no changes would be made until cross-party agreement was reached and the public was consulted on the issue.

Patients with Parkinson's disease are about five times more likely to become problem or pathological gamblers than others, concludes a new Canadian study that offers some of the most dramatic evidence to date of the unusual link. Almost one in 10 of the Parkinson's patients studied by psychiatrists in Calgary was found to have a gambling addiction of some sort, with the likely culprit being a type of drug prescribed to most people suffering from the condition, the researchers said.

The Gambling Act 2005 (the “Act”) governs the provision of gambling services within the UK, and came into effect in September 2007. At the Act’s core are the licensing objectives of keeping gambling crime-free, fair and open, and of protecting children and other vulnerable people from being harmed or exploited. Other key concepts include defining “gambling” to cover gaming, betting and participating in a lottery...

2007 and the first semester of 2008 have been marked by a “change of attitude” towards online gambling on the part of both the executive and the judiciary. This can be largely explained by the sending of a reasoned opinion by the European Commission to France last June, which put pressure on the one hand on the government to modify its gaming legislation to make it consistent with European law, and on the other hand on courts.