Microsoft apos;s £50bn Merger With Activision Blizzard Faces In-depth Probe

The review pointed to a 25.8 per cent fall in alcohol-related assaults, a 37.6 per cent drop in alcohol-related hospital admissions in Alice Springs and a 24.2 per cent decrease in admissions in Tennant Creek.

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Sam Antar is the nephew of Eddie Antar (pictured right in 1992), who founded the Crazy Eddie electronics stores in the 1970s and 1980s, who defrauded investors out of more than $74million. Eddie Antar died in 2016

The CMA said merging Activision with Microsoft could allow the tech giant to use games to 'damage' competition in the growing market for cloud gaming, which allows consumers to stream games to their devices in a manner similar to Netflix's offering for movies and TV shows.

Allowing the tribes to host internet gambling and take off-reservation bets would help improve relations and offset losses tribes have suffered from e-tabs, said Cynthia Monteau, a lawyer and executive director of the United Tribes Gaming Association, which consists of leaders from each of the state´s five tribes.

It has been nearly seven months since the former UFC middleweight champion lost to rival Israel Adesanya in a very close fight - and the 31-year-old Aussie is excited to step back in the Octagon and remind the world why he's the No.1 contender.

Whittaker has only ever lost two fights at middleweight in the UFC and both of them were to his heated rival Israel Adesanya. He believes he can win the third - he just needs to keep running up victories in the meantime to get a title shot.

Antar played live dealer blackjack and online slots, sometimes for 24 hours straight, he said in his lawsuit; he bet more than $5 million in one 16-day period in January 2020.
During the nine month period covered in the suit, he made more than 100,000 online bets.

'I've been in prison once, and I'm probably facing prison again, and it all had to do with me not being able to admit to myself I was a compulsive gambler,' Antar said in an interview with The Associated Press Thursday.

He also claims the companies paid him near-daily bonuses totaling $30,000 a month to keep him playing and pkvgames to entice him not to report problems with the games to the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement.

DraftKings, a big player in the U.S. mobile gambling market, supported legislation and a failed resolution last year to allow sports betting in North Dakota to join about two dozen other states.
The company said at the time that sports wagering already is taking place in North Dakota, with an estimated 138,000 people betting more than $355 million in illegal offshore markets annually each year.

The suit also references an October 8, 2019 text message from an MGM representative that read, 'OK, let's do this: I need you (to) email me that we are closing the case and that you will no longer contact (the Borgata president) or the DGE about the case,' referring to the Division of Gaming Enforcement.

In a July 17, 2019 text and email conversation, Antar quotes one as telling him 'other players are not getting anywhere near what you are getting' in terms of compensation for being kicked offline while gambling.

North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley, a Republican, said he has offered Burgum legal advice on the tribes´ proposal but would not disclose what it is.
Wrigley said he´s aware of the lawsuit in Florida.

In his lawsuit, Antar claims he alerted numerous employees and officials with the gambling companies to the fact that there was a serious, recurring problem with disconnections, but that they knowingly kept malfunctioning games available to the public because they were too profitable to take down.

Burgum in 2017 signed legislation that approved the electronic pull tab machines, despite opposition from tribes that warned the Las Vegas-style games would lure gamblers away from the state´s tribal-owned casinos.

Doug Burgum to approve the idea under tribal-state agreements known as compacts, the first of which was signed in 1992. The current compacts expire at the end of this year and only Burgum can approve them, said Deb McDaniel, North Dakota´s top gambling regulator.

Americans have bet more than $125 billion on sports with legal gambling outlets in the four years since the U.S. Supreme Court´s 2018 decision that lifted a federal ban on sports gambling, clearing the way for all 50 states to offer it.

Antar is a convicted fraudster who faces the prospect of additional prison time in November for a scheme in which he cheated friends and relatives of money he used to feed his compulsive gambling habit.

The proposal comes as Burgum has worked to improve state-tribal relations that have been especially strained since he took office in 2016 in the midst of prolonged protests and hundreds of arrests during the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline that passes beneath the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The tribe draws its water from the Missouri and fears pollution.