Next up: $730M Powerball prize after no Mega Millions winner
DES MOINES, Iowa – Thanks to math and bad luck, lottery players got another shot at a giant jackpot Wednesday night with a $730 million Powerball prize on the line.
The Powerball jackpot is the fifthlargest ever, and it will come only a day after nobody won the even larger Mega Millions prize, which now stands at $970 million.
It’s the first time both lottery jackpots have topped $700 million. The biggest prize was a $1.58 billion Powerball jackpot won by three people in 2016.
No one has won either of the jackpots since mid-september, allowing the prizes to grow steadily for months. Such a long stretch without a winner is rare but also reflects the incredibly small odds of winning – one in 292.2 million for Powerball and one in 302.5 million for Mega Millions.
Ex-arizona official to head to prison for illegal adoptions
PHOENIX – A former Arizona politician must report to prison Thursday to begin serving the first of three sentences for running an illegal adoption scheme that paid pregnant women from the Marshall Islands to come to the U.S. to give up their babies.
Paul Petersen, a Republican who served as Maricopa County assessor for six years and also worked as an adoption attorney, was sentenced to six years after pleading guilty in federal court in Arkansas to conspiring to commit human smuggling.
Petersen, who has acknowledged running the adoption scheme, is awaiting sentencing in state courts in Arizona for fraud convictions and in Utah for human smuggling and other convictions. Sentencing dates have not yet been set for those cases.
Prosecutors have said Petersen illegally paid women from the Pacific island nation to give up their babies in at least 70 adoption cases in Arizona, Utah and Arkansas. Marshall Islands citizens have been prohibited from traveling to the U.S. for adoption purposes since 2003.