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WHEN the Australian Securities and Investments Commission quietly dropped its opposition this week to betting on interest rate moves it raised the odds of the lucky country continuing an unwanted winning streak.

The latest edition of The Economist ranks Australians as the worlds biggest gamblers per capita, spending the equivalent of EUR902 ($1208.75) each last year.

Australia has led for the past decade, since we started doing this, and has always been well ahead of the other nations, said Joel Keeble of H2 Gambling Capital, which provided the British publications data.

Ignoring the statistical anomaly that is Singapore – its two new casinos nearly match the entire Las Vegas strip in terms of the gambling spend – the next closest competition for Australia is Ireland, which spent less than half as much on gambling.

Electronic gaming machines, the catch-all term that includes poker machines, account for most of this outsized lead on other developed nations, H2 said, but it noted Australians propensity to engage in a range of forms of gambling.

This now includes bets on next months interest rate decision by the Reserve Bank after the commission dropped attempts to ban the practice.

As of yesterday, the betting agency that the commission targeted, Centrebet, was offering punters a $1.12 return if interest rates remain unchanged and $26 if they are cut.

The corporate watchdog objected on the grounds that this amounts to trading in derivatives without a financial licence – a reference to the exotic financial instruments that helped trigger the global financial crisis.

But the most contentious issue remains Australians love affair with poker machines. This accounts for the big gap with the rest of the developed world when it comes to gambling expenditure.

A report by the Productivity Commission said $19 billion was spent on gambling in 2008-09, $12 billion of it on poker machines.

The commission said up to 40 per cent of the money spent on the pokies comes from problem gamblers, representing a $5 billion drain on an estimated 90,000 people.

It has now become a problem for the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, who received the much-needed support of the independent MP Andrew Wilkie to form a minority government by agreeing to implement a national mandatory precommitment scheme to curb problem gambling.

Centrebet has the Coalition as more likely to win the next federal election, but Ms Gillard can take comfort in the fact she is favoured by punters to lead the Labor Party to the election.

HOUSTON, May 21, 2011 — /PRNewswire/ — Spectra Energy Corp (NYSE: SE) Chief Financial Officer, Pat Reddy, will speak at the Barclays Capital Americas Select Conference on Tuesday, May 24, 2011, at The Langham Hotel, in London.

(Logo: #xA0;http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20061030/CLM051LOGO )

The presentation is scheduled to begin at approximately 13:30 BST (8:30 am EDT) and will be available via audio webcast. The presentation and webcast link can be accessed via the Investors Section of Spectra Energys Web site at www.spectraenergy.com. A replay of the webcast will be available for up to three months following the event

Spectra Energy Corp (NYSE: SE), a FORTUNE 500 company, is one of North Americas premier natural gas infrastructure companies serving three key links in the natural gas value chain: gathering and processing, transmission and storage, and distribution. For nearly a century, Spectra Energy and its predecessor companies have developed critically important pipelines and related infrastructure connecting natural gas supply sources to premium markets. Based in Houston, Texas, the company operates in the United States and Canada approximately 19,100 miles of transmission pipeline, more than 305 billion cubic feet of storage, as well as natural gas gathering and processing, natural gas liquids operations and local distribution assets. The company also has a 50 percent ownership in DCP Midstream, one of the largest natural gas gatherers and processors in the United States.#xA0;Spectra Energy is a member of the Dow Jones Sustainability World and North America Indexes and the US SP 500 Carbon Disclosure Projects Leadership Index for both Carbon Performance and Disclosure. For more information, visit www.spectraenergy.com.

SOURCE Spectra Energy Corp

One man has been arrested after a shootout at a busy shopping center Saturday afternoon in Greensboro.

Officers were close enough to hear the the shots as they were fired shortly after 3:15 pm at 947 Summit Ave.

Teams of federal and local law-enforcement agents swept across Hanover and Henrico counties on Tuesday morning, pulling dozens of computers and other electronic devices from alleged gambling parlors and shutting down the businesses.

It looked like some sort of assault, said an employee in a shop adjoining one of the targeted operations, the Bamp;W Business Center in the 7300 block of Staples Mill Road. They rolled in from the front and the back, wearing bulletproof vests.

The Henrico establishment and others, according to search warrants filed in circuit court, are under investigation as fronts for alleged illegal online computer gambling, a relatively new form of unregulated betting in Virginia. Customers put up money for points and can recover cash winnings in-house if they succeed at games of computerized matches and winning card hands.

Four establishments were targeted in Henrico and Hanover as well as the Henrico residence of Cameron L. Davis in the 8600 block of Queensmere Place, according to search warrants filed last week. Davis is identified as the owner/operator of a Luckys Sweepstakes on Brashier Boulevard in Mechanicsville that was raided.

By contrast, Richmond sites that use similar Internet devices for gaming are continuing to flourish, and Richmond Commonwealths Attorney Michael Herring says hes not planning any direct action until new laws go into effect July 1.

Search warrants used by Hanover undercover officers show that they worked since April infiltrating a business to establish that there is reason to believe that current gambling laws are being violated.

The officers won money at the Mechanicsville site and observed various people associated with the operation coming and going to Davis residence, according to a search warrant. Investigators say they found drug paraphernalia, suspected marijuana and hydrocodone, and shotgun ammunition at the home.

Late last week, a Henrico Circuit Court judge entered orders seizing the bank accounts of two Henrico operations, the one on Staples Mill and a similar operation at the Fountain Square shopping center in the 8000 block of West Broad Street called Hamp;L Business Center.

A court filing states that the request for the seizure occurred because the funds were used in connection with an illegal gambling enterprise or the money was proposed to be received by a winner in any illegal gambling transaction.

The operations in Henrico and Hanover after the raids last week were empty shells, devoid of any sign of activity.

But in Richmond, a check of online gaming establishments Friday found that all but one of the five known businesses are operating at full tilt with steady streams of customers. At Luckys Sweepstakes at 437 E. Belt Blvd., City Councilwoman Reva Trammells sister was handling the money and showed a visiting reporter how to play a game called Caribbean Crumble, the cheapest available.

Five dollars spent on game credits produced winnings of $1.80, or, in other words, a $3.20 income for the house.

Ritas worked there a few months, Reva Trammell said, describing establishments such as Luckys Sweepstakes and others in the city as perhaps deserving more regulatory oversight but not new laws effective July 1 that are designed to put them and similar operations out of business.

A lot of jobs will be lost, Trammell said, if the city operations close down; she praised the owner of Luckys Sweepstakes as someone who is helping the local community.

Court documents in Richmond show that person is Marty Lawson, who lives in Pinehurst, NC Larson did not respond to messages seeking comment. The business is fighting in Richmond Circuit Court to keep its lease in the face of smoking complaints. (It could not be learned last week if there is any association between Luckys Sweepstakes in Richmond and businesses of the same name in Henrico and Hanover.)

Herring said Friday that his office has watched the growth of five operations in the city since last fall but that more pressing criminal objectives have precluded actions similar to those taken in Henrico and Hanover and other localities across the state.

No charges have been filed in Hanover or Henrico; investigations there are continuing, according to investigators authorized to speak.

But Herring said his office is working with police to monitor the city operations and will be ready to enforce the new laws going into effect July 1.

Herring said those laws more clearly define what is illegal regarding operations of the so-called Internet cafÃs, and he noted that owner-operators can be charged with felonies.

What Im hoping is that all of these people will take a look at the statutes and leave. If they dont, well be bringing action against them. Effective July 2, if they are still operating, our position will be that they are breaking the law, and were coming after them.

Unlike the lottery and bingo in Virginia, the Internet gambling operations are not overseen by the state regarding income, payouts and expenses.

Meanwhile, the Richmond operations, some of them tucked in busy strip malls, offer a mix of public identities on their exterior but a consistent image inside: rooms filled with computer screens and pay windows.

The Belt Boulevard Luckys Sweepstakes facility Friday was a darkened den of patrons slumped over some of the more than 50 Internet screens, punching keybords to activate an assortment of games: Shamrock Sevens, Kangaroo, Keno, Route 66, Turbo Poker and Dragons and Dungeons, to name a few.

At 5725 Hull Street Road, a man refused to answer questions about operations at the 777 Hi Life Business Center and Sweepstakes, which is set up with more than 20 screens and a pay window. A reconfigured Subway sandwich shop is the home of Fish the Net, a business center according to signs out front at 6510 Midlothian Turnpike. Inside, it was also set up with about 20 screens.

The crackdown in Hanover and Henrico may be a factor in the sudden closing of a city operation in South Side that shut its doors last week despite a note out front that said it would be open 24 hours Friday and Saturday night. Good Times Business Services LLC, near the Lowes Store off Forest Hill Avenue, offers no suggestion on its store windows of gaming going inside, but neighboring business operators said Friday that customers line up outside waiting to play.

A call to a phone number posted on the front door produced only a voice mail asking callers to leave a message.

And off Nine Mile Road in Henrico, another parlor advertising itself as Luckys had its doors locked Friday night, although more than 30 Internet screens shone brightly inside. It was not clear if the operation had been visited by law enforcement during the Tuesday sweep.

While Herring is promising fast action against Internet cafÃs that fail to heed new laws July 1, others are saying the businesses already have drained legitimate charities of resources.

It is safe to say that these illegal games are a dangerous threat to the survival of many of your local charities and the services they provide, Chuck Lessin of the Virginia Charitable Bingo Association wrote Wednesday, the day after the raids in Henrico and Hanover, in a letter to city officials and copied to media outlets.

Lessin said he feels the city has not cooperated as much as it could have to determine the nature of the Internet cafÃs. He said the citys 31 charities that raise money through bingo games are suffering.

This matter is of critical importance to the health and viability of your local charities that have been a positive presence in your community for decades, Lessin wrote.

bmckelway@timesdispatch.com

(804) 649-6601

Hypersexual disorder might make DSM-5

At an annual meeting, psychiatrists also consider grouping compulsive gambling with substance-use disorders in the updated manual.

Alabama needs innovative tax incentives and streamlined access to information to help spur private sector job growth in the state, according to the Speakers Commission on Job Creations final report of recommendations released today.

House Speaker Mike Hubbard, R-Auburn, formed thecommission in February, asking a group of 15 business and community leaders to gather ideas that could help improve the states business climate and boost job growth.

Among the nine policy recommendations outlined in the Commissions report are using temporary state income tax incentives to offset the cost of federal tariffs for international companies locating in Alabama, cutting bureaucratic red tape and streamlining government services, and increasing access to capital.

I applaud the fine work of the commission in gathering truly inventive concepts and forming them into achievable recommendations, Hubbard said in a prepared statement.

Hubbard said some of the commissions recommendations have already been drafted into legislation to ensure they could pass before the 2011 Regular Session ends.

The Commission held four business leadership exchanges, or public hearings, in Birmingham and other cities throughout the state to seek suggestions and hear concerns from small business owners. In addition, the group solicited ideas via email and Facebook.

Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said on Saturday that one of the challenges in the financial sector that India faces today is the limited reach of financial services among the poor and vulnerable sections of the society.

Financial inclusion is a key determinant of sustainable and inclusive growth, which in turn is essential for building an equitable society. Financial inclusion is important as it provides an avenue to the poor to bring their savings into the organised financial system. It gives them an avenue to remit money to their families in villages, besides weaning them away from the clutches of the exploitative money lenders. It is essential to extend banking services to the rural hinterland at the earliest, so as to integrate those regions with the growing India, said Mr. Mukherjee while launching social banking initiatives of Union Bank of India here.

The Government has asked banks to provide banking facilities to habitations having a population of over 2,000 by March 2012. Banks have identified about 73,000 such habitations for providing banking facilities using appropriate technologies. A multi-media campaign, Swabhimaan, has been launched to inform, educate and motivate people to open bank accounts. During 2010-11, banks have covered about 29,000 villages. The remaining villages are to be covered during 2011-12.

Many a time lack of communication, awareness and language barriers creates a demand and supply gap for the financial services. This has to be addressed.

(NECN: Peter Howe, North Reading, Mass.,) Have you ever wondered: What happens between the time I click to buy something from an online retailer, and when it arrives in a package at your home or office?

Thats what a giant new four-acre building just opening for business in a business park off Interstate 93 is all about. Kiva Systems has just opened a new headquarters, five times as big as its old space in nearby Woburn, where its developing, building, and testing systems that deploy software-controlled robotic sleds to carry hundreds of pounds of goods around the warehouses where your dot-com order gets fulfilled. Theyre having a big grand-opening ceremony Tuesday after four months of completing the process of fixing up and moving into the old Teradyne and IBM Lotus Notes warehouse and testing facility.

While buying products online may feel to many like the apotheosis of automation, the reality is, it means outside of completely automated systems someone somewhere in a warehouse has to find your product, put it in a box, and mail or ship it to you. That has meant in many cases workers walk miles a day around giant order centers, basically putting your order in a shopping cart and rolling it over to a shipping center.

Kiva Systems founder and CEO Mick Mountz says he got thinking a few years back: These warehouses would be much more dynamic and efficient if you would just, if the products would just come to the operator instead of the other way around? As a founder of the short-lived 1990s online grocer Webvan, which collapsed under unexpectedly heavy costs of fulfilling online orders, Mountz wondered: How could robots make this better? That led to the creation of Kiva in 2003.

Instead of walking around the warehouse, which used to take 60 or 70 percent of an operators day, they now get to stand still, and all the products come to them, so that workforce is doing anywhere between two and four times as many orders per hour.

Kiva is all about a new concept in order fulfillment where all the products in the building can walk and talk on their own and come to the picker, Mountz added, instead of the picker having to walk to find the product.

The technology is already being used by online giants like Staples.com, Gilt Groupe, drugstore.com, diapers.com, Saks and Zappos. And Kivas growth has been explosive — doubling in just the last year to 205 employees, with plans to add 100 more by the end of this year.

Kivas George Diep gave me a demonstration of the technology, taking down on an iPad maybe the worlds most bizarre order of groceries — vermicelli, Gatorade, Wheat Thins and Spam. Once entered into the computer, robotic sleds showed up within a minute at our work station, where a laser light pointed at exactly the right spot in each rolling bin for me to pull out the right product. We then scanned it on a bar-code scanner, put it in a box, and pressed a done button to get the next product. From there, we would put a filled box on a conveyor belt or on another Kiva robotic sled to be rolled over to a shipping

Whats driving demand for technology like this is how much money were all spending online. Experts like Forrester Research and Wells Fargo Securities estimate that about 7 to 8 percent of all retail purchases are now made through a website, and thats been growing 15 to 20 percent for years. (If you back out the dollar value of gasoline, perishable groceries, and other products people cant or usually dont buy online, its far more than $1 in $12 we spend buying stuff online.)

An obvious question is why Kiva didnt decide to go a few more miles up Interstate 93 to New Hampshire, or to North Carolina or Texas or some state where the cost of doing business is much lower than it is in Massachusetts.

Mountz said the reason is the most important thing for Kiva at this stage of its growth is the unique combination of talent and suppliers he can find here — everything from skilled manufacturing staff to software and mechanical and electrical engineers, algorithm designers, and nearby suppliers of precision-machined equipment.

The Boston market turns out to be a great intersection of all that kind of talent, Mountz said. Over the next year, We have plans and budget to hire over 100 people going forward.

With videographer John E. Stuart

When President Obama announced that US special forces had
helicoptered into Pakistan, broken into a secret compound an hour
from the capital and killed Osama bin Laden, celebrations broke out
all across America.

The man who plotted the mass murder of 3,000 of us had at last
received his just reward. College students ran to the White House
to chant USA! USA!

Even if one believes that rejoicing at executions of murderers
is unseemly for a Christian people, the demands of justice had been
met. The world is a better place without bin Laden, who was
developing plans to blow up U.S passenger trains on the 10th
anniversary of 9/11.

Yet, in Pakistan and across the Middle East, even in London,
some came out to praise the martyr and threaten revenge.

In a way, this is the more interesting phenomenon. Why would
people, who must believe themselves righteous and moral, keen and
wail at the death of a monster who did what bin Laden had done?

Though Osamas time was past — only 18 percent of the Arab
world held a favorable view of him at his death — he was once
among the most admired figures in the Islamic world.

In 2003, in Jordan, 56 percent of the pubic voiced confidence in
Osama. In 2005, in Pakistan, 52 percent agreed. In July 2009, after
Obamas Cairo speech to the Muslim world, 22 percent of
Palestinians said the US president inspired confidence; 52
percent said Osama bin Laden did.

How to explain this? Do Arabs and Muslims approve of mass murder
of innocent civilians? Why did so many find so much to admire in a
man who planned the atrocities of 9/11?

In one mans judgment, Osama was admired because he alone in the
Arab world had the astonishing audacity to stand up and smash a
fist into the face of the worlds last superpower, which had become
one of the most resented powers in the Middle East. He was
applauded because he had struck the most savage blow dealt America
since British troops burned the Capitol and White House in
1814.

In short, the awe and admiration accorded bin Laden in the first
half of the last decade were directly proportional to the depth of
Arab and Muslim resentment and rage at the United States.

He was admired — for the enemy he hated and had attacked.

Nor is this unusual.

Why does Mao Zedong, who murdered 10 times as many Chinese as
Japan in World War II, lie in honor in a crystal sarcophagus in
Tiananmen Square? Because Mao is still seen to have liberated
China from a century of rule by hated Japanese and Western imperial
powers and their lackeys.

Like Mao, Osama tapped into the most powerful current of the
age: ethnic nationalism, the desire of peoples to be rid of foreign
rule and any oppressive foreign presence.

In his 1998 declaration of war, Osama gave three reasons.
Americans, he said, had deployed their infidel troops on sacred
Saudi soil. Americans were strangling a crushed Iraqi people with
murderous sanctions. Americans were enabling Zionists to oppress
and rob Palestinian Arabs of their lands.

It was when al-Qaida took to killing Arabs and Muslims that
Osama lost the prestige he once had.

Osama is dead and gone. But the ideas he tapped into — the
desire of Arab peoples to break free, to reclaim their sovereignty,
to restore their past greatness, to be rid of the foreigner and his
lackeys — are also the motivating ideas of the Arab Spring.

And as Victor Hugo reminded us, Greater than the tread of
mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

Patrick Buchanan is a political commentator, broadcaster and
former political candidate.