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What is Long Pao?
On 16 June, a coalition of gaming lobby groups, state associations and labour unions sent a letter to the Senate urging lawmakers to include language in the bill banning sports and casino-related contracts. Among the signatories were the American Gaming Association, the Indian Gaming Association, the Association of Gaming Equipment Manufacturers and the UNITE HERE unions.
“Litigation may eventually clarify the law, but this is ultimately a question of congressional intent. Congress should not wait while this nationwide expansion of gambling continues,” the letter said. “It should use crypto legislation to reaffirm a simple principle: sports betting falls outside the CFTC’s remit and cannot be offered through prediction market platforms.”
Following the vote, IGA Chairman David Bean said in a statement that the Senate “did the right thing” by not advancing the bill. The Clarity Act “could have expanded CFTC commodities authority” without clear protections, Bean said, but he cautioned that “it is not the end of this fight”.
About Long Pao
Vital Vegas ranked the display No. 4 on his 2014 list of “10 Things You Can Rub for Good Luck in Las Vegas Without Getting Arrested,” a list that featured three other Caesars Palace entries: the hand of the Caesars statue (No. 1); Joe Louis’s boxing gloves (No. 8); and the toe of Michelangelo’s David replica (No. 9).
The barge itself never actually floated, by the way. That was just a myth. It sat on a fixed platform that created a mild rocking motion. That piece of Vegas engineering, like the statue’s original perch, is now history.
The barge functioned as an intimate stage graced by legendary performers, including Dionne Warwick, Blues Traveler, Matt Goss, and CeeLo Green. Its final performer was another Vegas icon rumored to be powered by hydraulics: Wayne Newton. His “Up Close & Personal” residency in 2019 was the lounge’s final act before the pandemic shut down the Strip for 90 days and closed Cleopatra’s Barge for good in March 2020.
About Long Pao
“Our hope is that in the next few months there will be a window of opportunity where the market will be hotter and [it’s] a more interest rate friendly environment where we can go raise the money and then just put it in an escrow account,” Scheinthal said at the time.
That window Scheinthal had hoped for seems to be moving further away. Caesars’ proxy filing showed that even during negotiations in the spring, Fertitta refused to go above its $31-per-share offer “due to higher financing costs and increased macroeconomic risks”. From the end of 2025 to late April of this year, higher borrowing costs had resulted in “approximately $40 million per year in additional costs from when the process started”, the filing said.
Diller, for his part, lodged an all-cash, $48.30-per-share offer for MGM days after the Caesars deal broke. People Inc. finished Q2 with $1.1 billion in cash, but between the 74% of shares it would acquire, as well as MGM’s long-term debt of over $6 billion, some level of financing would be required. MGM appointed an independent committee to review the bid but has said nothing since.
