Reuters –  China’s balmy holiday island of Hainan, long touted as a place where the country could liberalise gambling, will not permit casinos, senior officials announced this week. The decision may dampen investment appetite from scores of international and national developers betting on stellar profits in the southern province. Luo Baoming, Hainan’s Communist Party chief, and Wang Yong, the mayor of resort city Sanya, told a briefing at China’s annual parliamentary meeting on Thursday that casinos will never be allowed to operate there. “We cannot at all allow Hainan to operate casinos,” Luo said according to the official Xinhua news…

BND.com – Participants at a hearing Monday in the south Chicago suburbs on whether to expand gambling in Illinois raised similar issues to the ones raised during a previous hearing in East St. Louis. Namely: * Would an expansion harm existing casinos? * Will horse-racing tracks be able to survive without it? But at the hearing in Tinley Park, there were a couple of other questions that overshadowed those: Which south-Chicago suburb should get a license for a brand new casino? And how would the revenue from that casino be shared? State Rep. Robert Rita, D-Blue Island, who is shepherding…

Las Vegas Sun – When Springfield, Mass., needed to choose who would build its first casino, the city hired an outside adviser to help with the process. The consulting firm Shefsky & Froelich recommended the deal go to MGM Resorts International. At the same time, the consulting firm also was working as a registered lobbyist in Illinois for MGM Resorts. The arrangement highlights an often-overlooked trend as more cities and states embrace legalized gambling around the country: Private companies are being hired to write regulations and vet casinos, even as the same firms work the other side of the fence,…

From ABC News With legal gambling now moving beyond the casinos and onto the Internet, the industry is bracing for the most far-reaching changes in its history. A Las Vegas firm, Ultimate Gaming, on Tuesday became the first in the U.S. to offer online poker, restricting it, for now, to players in Nevada. New Jersey and Delaware also have legalized gambling over the Internet and expect to begin offering such bets by the end of this year. And many inside and outside the industry say the recent position taken by the federal government that states are free to offer Internet…