Bingo club being taken over by squatters...

A former bingo hall in Camrbidgeshire has been taken over by a group of squatters. The Gala Bingo hall was closed on May 22 2009 but squatters quickly moved in after realising it was unused.

As many as 20 people are said to have entered the building, lead by Scott Bricas.

In a statement Mr Bricas stated:

“This is a protest against councils and the capitalist system which are abandoning communities. We are calling for radical social change.”

Support grows to keep bingo tax at 15%...

The Bingo Association has launched a brand new website aimed at gaining support for keeping the bingo tax at 15%.

Online bingo sites such as Mecca Bingo and Gala Bingo are supporting the move as part of the membership of the association. The petition to keep the tax low already has over 2,000 signatures on the Goverments petition website.

The I’m Backing Bingo website also invites people to join the Facebook group to help raise support.

First Bingo Games in the USA...

Though Europe was introduced to the game of bingo quite early on, it still took about a hundred years for bingo to make it to the shores of the U.S where it finally made an appearance in around 1929. One fateful evening , Edwin S. Lowe who was a troubled toymaker in the Great Depression of the 1920s was passing by a fair a few miles away from Jacksonville. Thinking that he would rest for a while, he got down and went to the fair. Surprisingly, all the booths in the fair were tightly shut and the only one open was attracting a huge crowd.

Intrigued, Lowe tried to get to know what was really going on. After a certain amount of shoving and pushing, he finally got a view of the booth. There was a small table which was laden with cards and beans. On each card, certain numbers were written. The caller kept pulling disks out of his box and shouted the number pulled out aloud. All the participants excitedly checked their bingo cards to see whether they had the number. If they did, they placed a bean on the card. This simple game kept people engrossed for hours and convinced Lowe that it had a future in U.S.