The Republic of Georgia is mulling a total prohibition of online gambling as part of its gambling regulatory overhaul, although not everyone in the government is convinced it’s a good idea.

Last week, Georgian media reported on a disagreement brewing between two special commissions tasked with studying the nation’s gambling laws. One of these commissions is organized by the nation’s parliamentarians and the other by bureaucrats in the Ministry of Finance.

According to the report, the parliamentarians are pushing for a total ban on online gambling, while the Finance officials are skeptical that such a ban would result in any significant reduction in online gambling activity, given the experiences of other countries who have attempted similar bans.

Deputy Finance Minister Lasha Khutsishvili said his department’s analysis of the net effect of other nations’ online gambling bans had concluded that “at present there are no effective mechanisms to actually prohibit online games. Millions of the state budget are spent on such measures, but in vain.”

Antigua and Barbuda’s ambassador in Washington wants the US government to finally make good on its outstanding World Trade Organization financial obligations to help Barbuda rebuild after Hurricane Irma.

On Tuesday, Voice of America published an interview with Ronald Sanders, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United States and the Organization of American States for Antigua and Barbuda, in which Sanders detailed the destruction inflicted upon the island of Barbuda last week from Hurricane Irma’s Category 5 fury.

Sanders (pictured) noted that, unlike the region’s other island nations that were in Irma’s direct path, Antigua and Barbuda has no formal ties to Europe or America on which to rely for financial and logistical support. “At the end of the day, it is our country, we have to try our best to keep it going as best we can.”

Sanders said he was encouraged by media reports that actor Robert de Niro, who, along with Australian casino mogul James Packer, has been linked to an integrated resort project in Barbuda, had pledged to aid Barbuda’s relief effort.

Cambodia’s long-awaited new gambling law is reportedly ready to be submitted to the government’s cabinet for approval later this month.

On Tuesday, the Khmer Times quoted Ros Phearun, deputy director-general of Cambodia’s Finance Ministry’s financial industry department, saying the gambling draft law – which has been promised for over three years now – had been finalized by joint technical teams at both the Finance and Interior ministries, paving the way for cabinet to receive the finished results within the month.

Phearun suggested that cabinet officials weren’t likely to raise any serious objections to the law’s text, given that it was prepared following “many inter-ministerial and stakeholders’ meetings” and therefore incorporates “lots of inputs from all concerned ministries and parties.”

As previously suggested last October, the draft law is believed to call for a gambling revenue tax of between 4% and 5%, roughly comparable to the rate imposed on Singapore’s two integrated resorts. This would be a better fate than the 5% to 7% rate originally anticipated by Tim McNally, chairman of Cambodia’s largest casino operator NagaCorp.

South Korea’s leading casino Kangwon Land is reeling from a corruption scandal in which 95% of staff turned out to have been hired due to their political connections.

On Tuesday, the state-owned Kangwon Land issued an official statement saying 493 of the 518 people hired between July 2011 and February 2014 had won their jobs primarily on the strength of their ties to politicians or other influential figures.

According to a report in the Korea Times, the company laid most of the blame on Choi Heung-jip, who was Kangwon Land’s CEO during the period in question. Choi and a Kangwon Land human resources official were indicted in 2015 but current government members say the Liberty Korea Party, which was in power at the time of the scandal, pressured prosecutors to end their probe before the full depth of the shenanigans was exposed.

The casino’s statement described the hiring scandal as “a crime which would have been possible only in the 1960s or ‘70s.” The statement apologized that “a thing of the past is tarnishing the image of Kangwon Land, which has been trying hard to improve its transparency in recent years.”

Rumors are spreading that China is set to shut down local bitcoin exchanges. Headlines may be squawking that the price of bitcoin has plummeted because of this, but nothing out of the standard deviation of regular bitcoin volatility has occurred in reaction to this news. As news sites battle for your clicks, they have to put in emotional words like “plummet” to get you to read the lede sentence of the article, but no plummeting has taken place.

First of all, local exchanges themselves are denying that any ban has been enacted. This denial can be taken with a grain of salt because of course local exchanges have a vested interest in denying that their business is banned for as long as possible. Second, the denial report comes from ZeroHedge, a somewhat hysterical website that, while it does have accurate reporting at times, does have the tendency to sensationalize.

The real issue is not whether a ban on local exchanges is happening or not, but whether such a ban means anything at all. As we’ve covered before, most of Chinese bitcoin trading volume is already off the direct exchanges and has moved almost entirely to P2P networks like Localbitcoins. Beijing has been clear that P2P networks are not being targeted, but only direct exchanges. This shift in trading volume happened back in February and has been mostly spurred by the desire to maintain privacy. The Chinese government is already monitoring the exchanges with hawk eyes, so if you want to move money with privacy in China, you have to do it peer-to-peer.

What’s interesting then is the hidden message that China is sending by banning only direct exchange sites, which now constitute a negligible amount of bitcoin trading volume in China. The hidden message is, “We don’t like bitcoin, but we’re too afraid of it to put up a real fight.”