Antigua-WTO: NY Times Article...

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/...ess/gamble.php

NEW YORK: With long blond hair reaching his shoulders and dozens of cloth bracelets peeking out from under his sleeves, Mark Mendel hardly conjures up the image of a typical lawyer.

But then there is nothing run-of-the-mill about the case that Mendel, a Texan who was born and reared in Southern California, has been waging against his own government before the World Trade Organization.

It is a clash that at once challenges Washington's attempt to prohibit online gambling while simultaneously testing the ability of the WTO to enforce its own standards.

The dispute stretches back to 2003, when Mendel, 51, first persuaded officials in Antigua and Barbuda, a tiny nation in the Caribbean with a population of about 70,000, to make a trade complaint against the United States, claiming that its ban against Americans' gambling over the Internet violated Antigua's rights as a member of the WTO....

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