Miss Nevada 2006

Online gambling advocates bet on legal future in U.S.

WASHINGTON - That's despite a Department of Justice crackdown April 15 on the three largest online poker sites used by Americans for allegedly violating the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. All are offshore providers.

Since 2006, it has been illegal to process payments for winnings through U.S. banks.

Earlier, law enforcement hadn't really tried to stop access to offshore providers. The DOJ has filed a civil complaint alleging money laundering; it seeks $3 billion held by the three companies.

Though online gambling is illegal, an estimated 16 million Americans engage in it. The business is worth more than $6 billion a year.

Eyeing potential tax revenues, New Jersey's state legislature passed an Internet bill this year but Gov. Chris Christie vetoed it. Washington, D.C., is scheduled to take up a legalization proposal this week.

In Congress, a bill that would legalize online gambling -- sponsored by U.S. Reps. John B.T. Campbell, R-Calif., and Barney Frank, D-Mass. -- is pending but appears a long shot. A similar bill passed with bipartisan support out of the Financial Services Committee last year but never got a floor vote.

Last Friday, U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, introduced a poker-only legalization effort in front of the U.S. Capitol, surrounded by co-sponsors, including Campbell, Frank, and U.S. Reps. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., and Shelley Berkley, D-Nevada. They indicated the poker-only approach probably had a better chance of prevailing this year. Frank noted that poker accounts for more than 90 percent of online gambling.

David G. Schwartz, who directs the University of Nevada-Las Vegas' Center for Gaming Research, said passage of any Internet bill by this Congress "is such a crap shoot -- pun intended, I guess -- with everything being held captive to partisan politics."

At a hearing in May, Cohen asked Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. about the federal effort in New York to take down PokerStars, FullTilt Poker and Absolute Poker, to block domain names associated with poker websites and freeze bank accounts.

"Do you think we really ought to be spending a lot of time in trying to deal with Internet poker?" Cohen asked him.

Holder said he had to enforce "the law as it exists."

Internet gambling opponents -- such as Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition and other socially conservative groups -- continue to point to the social fallout from all forms of gambling. But the National Football League, which had long opposed Internet gambling, gave its support after the bill that got through the financial services committee was amended to explicitly prohibit sports betting.

Which Beauty Queens Have Been Dethroned? - UsMagazine.com

Are the most famous beauty queens also the most infamous?

The Miss USA 2011 competition gets underway this Sunday, airing live from Las Vegas on NBC. Fifty-plus beautiful, ambitious young women from around the country will be vying to nab the crown -- and, hopefully, avoid the kind of scandals that have cost many pageant winners to step down amid major scandal.

PHOTOS: Stars who've posed for the cover of Playboy

Us Weekly looks back at some of the most memorable dethrone pageant queens -- including one who became an A-list star, still going strong today!

Vanessa Williams : Now 48, Williams (Miss New York) became the first African-American woman to be crowned Miss America in September 1983. Ten months later, however, an anonymous caller told Williams that arty nude photos taken of her back in 1982 were about to surface. (Williams claimed she never signed a release authorizing use of the pics.) She stepped down as Miss America amid the scandal in a July 1984 press conference, with the photos appearing in the September 1984 issue of Penthouse . Williams has stayed in the public eye since that controversy as a successful singer and actress with Grammy, Emmy and Tony Award nominations.