Bona fide Moneybookers members can register for the promotion by entering their e-mail address at the promotion web site. Players who are not Moneybookers members and want to participate in the promotion can enroll now by signing up through supported online casinos. In the Road to South Africa promotion every 200th eligible transaction in any calendar week will win a prize. Eligible transactions are payments of €50 or more (or equivalent amount in another currency) made to any Moneybookers online casino. Moneybookers will not deduct any amount from the transfer for participation in this promotion. Nor will Moneybookers levy any charge. Withdrawals from Moneybookers accounts or person to person transactions do not qualify as eligible transactions. Payments made to online merchants other than online casinos count as eligible transactions provided they are at least €50.

For the Road to South Africa promotion Moneybookers has classified the transactions into different tiers on the basis of the amounts. Each tier has a different set of prizes. Tier 1 is called Kick Off and has prizes like a Sony Walkman and a World Cup mascot doll. Tier 2 is called First Half and has prizes like multimedia player and dart set. Tier 3 is called Half Time and has prizes like LCD television and vintage beauty case. Tier 4 is called Second Half and has prizes like a digital camera and table football set. Tier 5 is called Extra Time and has prizes like Mac desktop computer and home cinema system. If the player transaction is a multiple of 200 and is of eligible amount, then the player will be given a prize from the tier corresponding to the transaction amount.

Players with VIP status at Moneybookers follow a different Road to South Africa. Every time they complete a specified transaction level they are guaranteed the prize corresponding to that level and can then be in line for the next one. The top tier VIP prizes include a seat at a Football World Cup match and a trip to Las Vegas during the World Series of Poker.

One of the slots game has the exciting title Lady in Red. It is a 5 reel and 25 payline video slot. This game has the music of the 1930s as its theme when jazz bands ruled. The Lady in Red, the singer in the band, is the wild symbol and doubles payouts when she assists to make winning combinations. The Paparazzi with his old fashioned flash bulb camera is the scatter symbol. It triggers the free spins bonus round in which the player is awarded up to 25 free spins at tripled payouts. The free spins can be retriggered. Lady in Red does not offer a progressive jackpot but has an attractive highest fixed jackpot of 12,500 coins. This is triggered when five Lady in Red Logo symbols align in one of the active paylines. Other symbols on the reels include the Band, the Red Roses, the Cognac and high value card symbols. Players can wager up to 10 coins per payline making a total of maximum 250 coins per spin. The coin size varies from 0.01 to 0.20, which makes Lady in Red affordable to low rollers.

The other new slot game also has a female in the lead. Therefore Microgaming has put up two exciting women against the Norse god Thor of Thunderstruck II. However this time the woman is Queen of the Jungle and the scene is an African forest. The other symbols on the reels are the Monkeys, a Tarzan type he-man, Fruits and high value card symbols. The Queen of the Jungle is the wild symbol and the Monkeys symbol is the scatter. Free spins are triggered by the Passion Juice symbol. Three or more Monkeys symbols trigger a bonus game on the second screen in which players can choose from three games. Monkey Gift Bonus and Monkey Fetch Bonus are bonus games in which players pick an item to reveal the bonus amount. The best is the Monkey Chop Bonus in which players get to pick coconuts until one does not break. The coin size ranges from 0.01 to 0.50 giving players greater wagering options.

The release date has been set for May 5, 2010. Then Lady in Red, Queen of the Jungle along with Thunderstruck II will be live at all Microgaming online casinos. CasinoAdvisor recommends Platinum Play, Spin Palace, All Jackpots, River Belle and Roxy Palace.

In June Gov. Ted Strickland proposed a plan to allow slot machines into Ohio’s seven horse racing tracks, which is estimated to bring in $1 billion a year for the state.

Jane Morris is the wife of the manager of Steiner Stock Farm in Lima. She does a lot of work helping out at the horse farm. She said gambling at the horse races is the way they make a living.

“We have lost money and hundreds of jobs in the last couple years because people go out of Ohio in order to do their gambling at other horse racing tracks, ” Morris said.States like Pennsylvania, Indiana, and New York allow slot machine gambling.

Morris said while 50 percent of the money made from slot machines would go back to the state, a percentage goes towards the track owners and the upkeep of the horses.”We aren’t asking for a bailout; we want to help give the state money,” Morris said. “The state already collects $450 million a year in license fees.b”Money from gambling also goes directly towards the purses offered to horses. A purse is the pool of money horses compete for. Morris said in states like Pennsylvania a purse is six to eight times larger than in Ohio.b”We’re now going out of Ohio to breed horses because Ohio horses have to race in Ohio and we won’t make any money if we do that,” Morris said.

Sam Zonak, executive director of the Ohio State Horse Racing Commission, said slot machines in horse racing tracks is the only way to save horse racing in Ohio. “Ohio is not on an even-playing field with other states. Ohio used to be No. 1 in U.S. for breeding and racing, now we’re No. 9,” Zonak said. There’s been a lot of debate over whether it’s responsible to install more gambling mechanisms in race tracks.

“Legislators want to protect people from themselves, but big brother is already around enough these days,” Morris said. The office of Senate President Bill Harris is concerned with Strickland’s plan and wants to put it to a public vote. “Ohio voters on four different occasions have put down extended gambling,” said Maggie Ostrowski, spokesperson for Senator Harris.

Lynch announced the formation of a fifteen member Commission on Friday to examine exactly how gambling expansion would take place if lawmakers ever approved the measure. The Commission will have studies done, and report back to Lynch.

“These are important questions that must be addressed in a careful and thoughtful way to help inform the public debate about expanded gaming in New Hampshire,” said Lynch after signing the executive order.

The executive order is the second one regarding gambling in the past week. Earlier in the week, Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio signed an order to allow slot machine gambling at state racetracks/ Legislators in Ohio are planning to battle the executive order.

The state Senate is in favor of expanded gambling. They have already passed a Bill that would have brought slot machines to New Hampshire racetracks, but the House killed the proposal.

The House has been unwilling to include the expanded gambling in the new state budget, and Lynch believes that if properly informed, they may have a change of heart. The Commission will consist of members from within the community and also lawmakers.

Here’s how it works: users follow Tweet2Play on Twitter, wait for instructions from the site and start off with 25 free “spins.” To play those spins, users will send a direct message to Tweet2Play with the word “SPIN” and the site makes a spin for you and sends you the result. Every time you win, the site sends a link with a chance to win a real prize.

Users can earn extra spins by including “#Tweet2Play” in an update to get credit. The site will send users a note with a thank-you and the number of free spins it has added. The number of free spins per update is determined by the number of followers you have. Getting help and figuring out your ranking is handled by sending direct messages to Tweet2Play with the commands “HELP or “RANK” to get the desired result.

[These policies] were supposed to lift all boats; instead, we got a gigantic bubble which burst.

Leopold, executive director of two nonprofit educational organizations—the Labor Institute and Public Health Institute—spoke last night at the National Labor College (NLC) in Silver Spring, Md.

Over the past three decades, Leopold says, real wages dropped for working people while the super rich prospered under the new policies. In 2006, for example, the top 0.1 percent of the nation—about 130,000 people—had as much income as the bottom 50 percent—some 64 million people. From an economic perspective, he says, if you let income get that skewed, you’re going to have a financial crash.

That’s what happened in 1929 before the Great Depression and again in 2008, he says. So much money poured into the hands of the rich that it created a demand for new ways to invest, and Wall Street responded with a series of shaky financial packages.

It was like we gave Wall Street the keys to the car and watched them crash it right in front of us.

Any financial reform must consider that putting so much money in the hands of so few is a recipe for disaster, Leopold says.

It’s like drugs. You can regulate the supply, but if you don’t cut the demand (so much money in the hands of the rich), nothing will change. Wall Street will simply come up with new schemes.

The test for whether a proposed solution to the financial crisis should simply be whether it is moving money out of Wall Street to the real economy and from the top of the economic scale to the bottom, Leopold says.

Progressives should be fighting for sweeping changes to narrow the wage gap. While unions have been sounding the alarm for decades about the growing inequality, most people ignored it, he says. The union agenda of raising the minimum wage, increasing tax levies on corporations and the super-rich and passing the Employee Free Choice Act are all key policies that will help restore balance to the economy, he adds.

Leopold also called for wage caps across the board on Wall Street and a new tax on financial transactions.

The financial reform policies being pushed by the Obama administration and Congress are filled with “incredible rhetoric, but with weak knees,” Leopold says.

The $13 trillion bailout of the financial markets has put all of Wall Street “on welfare,” and now is the time for progressives to push hard for real change. But progressives are letting the banking industry and others get away with framing the debate on reform, Leopold says.

He points to the notion among many in Congress that reforms should not hinder the financial market’s ability to innovate.

[Financial innovation] is a lot of bunk. They’re just creating a better casino game. We have to be very cautious. [The bankers] are not creating an iPod; they’re creating a slot machine with our money.

While giant Las Vegas gambling operators struggle to fill their casinos, the gaming manufacturers that supply them are doing great business. The need to create new revenues has caused a tide of expanded gambling to cover the US, and slot suppliers are churning out machines to stock new venues.

Just this week, Illinois funded a $31 billion infrastructure bill through expanded gaming. Video poker machines will be legal at local establishments that serve alcohol, and state tracks will carry slots.

An estimated 77,000 video poker machines may flood the state, along with thousands of slots. And the same day, Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio issued an executive order to put slots at the seven tracks in his state, resulting in another potential 18,000 machines.

Joseph Gref cautioned in a JPMorgan client note that the actual number of video poker games may be half that optimistic estimate, and says “we think there will be additional regulatory oversight for this expansion so we think the earliest for new shipments would be calendar 2010.”

But companies like IGT, Bally’s, and WMS all seem likely to find enough orders to cause satisfactory results, especially compared to such companies as Las Vegas Sands and MGM Mirage. While Gref says he expects IGT to get as much as 60 percent of the new Illinois business, there is still Ohio to equip… and potentially Massachusetts this fall…and then maybe Kentucky…