Good intentions do not always make for good legislation. The Tamil Nadu government’s effort to protect its youth from the temptations of online gambling by amending a colonial gaming law to ban online rummy and poker, has not survived judicial scrutiny. Its amendment to the Tamil Nadu Gaming Act, 1930, has been struck down by the Madras High Court, which found the prohibition unreasonable because it sought to bring even games predominantly of skill under the label of gambling, if there was an element of betting or even prize money or any other stake involved. The State’s intention was acceptable to the extent that it sensed the danger involved in allowing addictive games. However, it erred in failing to make a distinction between games of skill and games of chance, and in seeking to treat as ‘gaming’ anything that involved stakes, contrary to judicial pronouncements circumscribing the term to games that are based on chance. In an audacious move that the court found completely
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President Joe Biden and the director of the CDC warned this week that the COVID-19 crisis in the U.S. was becoming a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. This underscores the growing divergence across U.S. States and communities in terms of the prevalence and intensity of the Delta variant infection, depending on the extent to which these cohorts had been vaccinated. Approximately 30% of the adult population has yet to be vaccinated, along with 58% of those in the 12-17 years age group. The country has reached this troubling impasse despite a strong start. To date, 348 million doses have been given so far. This came on the back of the firm commitment by the Biden administration to follow the science in the tackling of the pandemic, and quickly secure pledges from vaccine manufacturers — including Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — to supply 700m doses by the end of July 2021, enough to cover 400m people. Using everything from consistent high-level messaging by the President and his
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