Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Firm wipes out $1M prize win for ex-TV star
Woman finds reason to live in educating
BOSTON — Sports gambling giant DraftKings won’t give a former “Bachelor” contestant the $1 million prize for winning an online fantasy football contest after she and her husband were accused of cheating.
Jade Roper-Tolbert, who appeared in “The Bachelor” and “Bachelor in Paradise” television series in 2015, was no longer listed as the winner of DraftKings’ “Millionaire Maker” contest, which involved picking a lineup of players from the NFL’s four wild-card games.
“DraftKings has decided to update the standings for several contests,” the Boston-based company said in a statement Saturday. A spokesman declined to elaborate.
Roper-Tolbert beat more than 100,000 entries to take the top prize in the “Millionaire Maker contest.”
But some in the fantasy sports community were quick to complain that both she and her husband, Tanner Tolbert, also an alum of the “Bachelor” franchise, each submitted the maximum 150 entries allowed in the contest and that nearly all the entries had a uniquely different lineup of players.
That suggests the two may have colluded to give themselves the best shot at winning the top prize, which is not allowed under the contest rules.
Roper-Tolbert has been regularly playing in DraftKings NFL contests this season, and Tolbert is a prolific fantasy sports player.
The two met as contestants on “Bachelor In Paradise” and married in 2016. They’ve said the big win was “pure luck.”
Earlier this month, when DraftKings announced it would review the contest, the couple suggested that Roper-Tolbert is being singled out because she’s a female celebrity.
“It is incredibly important for us to establish that Jade’s win is nothing more than pure luck and we are confident that DraftKings will determine the same,” they said in a statement to celebrity website TMZ on Jan. 7.
NEW YORK — Bronia Brandman pulls up a sleeve on her leather jacket and shows the blue tattoo inked on her forearm that is a mute testimony to her pain under the Nazis at Auschwitz.
For 50 years, she said, she couldn’t speak about it; for 25 years, she couldn’t laugh; and to this day, she cannot cry. But she remembers every detail of those haunting days.
Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, telling her story is the driving force of Brandman’s life. Her mission is to educate others. The 88-year-old said being among the last who can offer personal testimony is especially important at a time when a rising tide in global anti-Semitism is spreading “like wildfire,” while fewer young people know about the Holocaust and its death camps. “Sixty percent of millennials between 18 and 34 don’t know that Auschwitz existed. This is so painful,” she said citing a report.
Brandman was born in the town of Jaworzno, Poland in 1931. She grew up in her grandfather’s home with her five siblings, and her parents, who owned a hardware store. Most of her immediate and extended family was sent to the concentration camps. She never saw her parents and one of her two brothers again.
NEW ORLEANS — A man who had been pointing a gun at people in New Orleans’ historic French Quarter was critically wounded Saturday in a shootout with police.
New Orleans Police Superintendent Shaun Ferguson said officers responded to reports of an armed man near St. Louis and Bourbon streets around 7:30 a.m. Saturday. When they arrived, an “exchange of gunfire” began, and the armed man was hit in the chest.
Brandman and her three sisters evaded capture but were eventually caught, crammed into a rail car made for livestock and sent to Auschwitz, where 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were gassed, shot, hanged or starved. In all, 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
Her first memory there is of Josef Mengele, the German doctor who conducted horrific experiments on thousands of Jews at Auschwitz, she said.
“We had to pass him, and it was
He is being treated at University Medical Center, Ferguson said.
No officers were injured.
It’s unclear who fired first, the man or the officers.
Four officers who responded, including the three who fired their weapons, have been reassigned, a standard practice for officer-involved shootings, Ferguson said. The officers will be placed on desk duty while the department’s Force Investigation Team reviews body-camera and surveillance footage to determine our turn. He wore white gloves and he pointed to the three of us to the left. He pointed Mila, my oldest sister to the right. I knew what was in store for us,” she said. “I had nothing to lose. I ran to my sister’s line,” she said. Brandman realized quickly that she had abandoned her younger sisters. “It meant my baby sisters were going to the gas chambers alone,” she said.
“There was something inside of me that would not give up and give the Nazis another victory,” she wrote in her book, “The Girl Who Survived: A True Story of the Holocaust.” whether their decision to fire was justified.
Other agencies, from the city’s Independent Police Monitor to the FBI, will also track the investigation, Ferguson said.
“It’s an unfortunate incident when officers have to resort to using their weapons,” Ferguson said. “We’re praying for the family of this individual and our officers.”
The names of the officers involved and the gunman were not immediately released.