“A highly publicized bust of a poker tournament at a Greensboro restaurant last spring essentially put an end to promoting the events here, law enforcement officials say.But the company that organized the tournament hasn’t folded. [P] Charlotte-based 5th Street Entertainment filed a lawsuit in Guilford County Superior Court in November asking a judge to clarify [...]

An interesting situation is developing in Georgia. A newly incorporated city has adopted content-based legislation that its parent [Fulton County] had enacted twice before — only to be stopped by two federal lawsuits. “It was time to shut down the abuses that Fulton County had ignored,” the City’s attorney said here.

This article in Geek.com begins, “Charlie Crist, the attorney general for the state of Florida, has been a vocal critic of Spam. A press release on his website quotes him as saying, ‘Spam is an annoying, intrusive form of email that almost all of us receive but few of us want. Much of it is [...]

Charles C. Haynes, a senior scholar at the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center, offers this seasonal article which appears in today’s The Daily Herald. Haynes observes: “Once the birth of Jesus was made a ‘national holiday,’ taking ‘Christ out of Christmas’ was destined to happen. Today, the secular, commercial ‘Xmas’ so dominates that even some [...]

The article from the New York Times appears here.

“A federal judge blocked on Thursday a new California law that would have banned the sale of violent video games to minors,” as reported here by the San Francisco Chronicle. You can read on the order granting a preliminary injunction here.

“New York’s highest court has issued its fourth ruling in the long-running saga of one of the earliest initiatives of the Giuliani administration—the crackdown on ‘adult businesses’ in New York City through a zoning ordinance intended to sharply reduce the number of such businesses and limit them to relatively remote industrial areas. The Court of [...]

“Horry County may take another shot at clamping down on adult-oriented businesses along thoroughfares such as U.S. 17 and 501, this time with a costly new business license system.Nearly all county crackdown efforts over the past two decades have failed or remain tangled up in court, including police raids of several strip clubs last year [...]

“Driven by the immense popularity of poker, bars and restaurants and private clubs increasingly have asked the county liquor board in recent months for permission to cash in by offering free or charity tournaments for patrons. But wary of opening the door to illegal gambling, the Board of Liquor License Commissioners is forcing them to [...]

“In a ruling handed down today affirming as constitutional a Ten Commandments display in Mercer County, Ken., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit declared, ‘The First Amendment does not demand a wall of separation between church and state.’ The court also criticized the ACLU’s repeated reference to the construct, calling it ‘tiresome’ [...]