It wasn’t all bad
■■ A Massachusetts woman just got a fortune, thanks to store owners who returned a $1 million lottery ticket she had discarded. Lea Rose Fiega bought the lottery ticket at Lucky Stop but handed it back after thinking it was a dud. Ten days later, Abhi Shah, the son of the store’s owners, saw that the lottery ticket hadn’t been entirely scratched off, and discovered a $1 million prize underneath. After two days of deliberation with his parents, he gave the ticket back to Fiega. “Who does that? They’re great people. I am beyond blessed,” Fiega said.
■■ A 10-year-old Nigerian refugee has become the country’s newest national chess master. Having fled to America in 2017 from the extremist group Boko Haram, Tanitoluwa “Tani” Adewumi started learning chess three years ago at a New York City school while living in a homeless shelter with his family. Just a year later, Tani won the New York State chess championship for his age group, and now is the 28thyoungest person in the U.S. ever to achieve the national chess ranking. Tani spends 10 hours every day practicing chess. His next goal? To become the world’s youngest grandmaster. “I really love that I finally got it,” said Tani.
■■ An Austrian-Jewish man felt forever indebted to the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon for hiding him and his family from the Nazis during World War II. So when Erich Schwam passed away in December, he left a fortune believed to be about $2.4 million for the village, to be used to fund scholarships and schools. Le Chambon, close to the site where the Vichy regime created a prison camp for Jews, hid Jewish refugees from the Nazis and French collaborators; its role in saving Jews has been recognized by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
“We are extremely honored,” said the town’s deputy mayor, Denise Vallat.