NEW YORK: Organisers of the Powerball lottery appealed on Friday for the owner of a winning ticket to come forward and collect a $1m prize that has been unclaimed for nearly a year. “Check your wallet, clean out the drawers and dig in your pants pockets because a New Jersey Lottery player, somewhere, has a $1m winning Powerball ticket that will expire on May 16,” officials said in a statement. The winning ticket was sold in a shop in South Brunswick with the numbers 3, 7, 21, 28, 43 and 2. The lottery draw was made on May 16 last year. Prizes can be claimed for up to a year after the draw, meaning the mystery winner has just under three weeks to collect the $1m windfall.
French Socialists soften tone on Merkel
PARIS: France’s ruling Socialist party will remove strongly worded criticism of German Chancellor Angela Merkel from a draft text on Europe that revealed the level of hostility Berlin’s focus on austerity, its coordinator for Europe said yesterday. Cooperation between France and Germany has long provided the main motor for decision-making in the European Union. But a debt crisis has strained those ties in the past year as ideologically opposed leaders have disagreed on points of economic policy. A document to be presented at a June party brainstorming conference on Europe had described the German leader as “self-centered” and said her austerity policies were hurting Europe. But this “stigmatising language used towards Angela Merkel” would now be removed, Jean-Christophe Cambadelis, deputy-chairman of the Party of European Socialists (PES), said on his website.
Daily deals website LivingSocial hacked
SAN FRANCISCO: Hackers broke into a daily deals website backed by online retail titan Amazon.com and breached the accounts of 50 million members, according to a report on Friday by All Things Digital. Names, birth dates and encrypted password information was swiped in a cyber-attack at LivingSocial, according to a report at AllThingsD.com. No credit card or merchant financial information was stolen during the attack, AllThingsD said, citing an email sent to LivingSocial employees by its chief executive. LivingSocial is a Washington, DC-based Internet firm that provides users with discounts at local businesses. The company reportedly has 70 million members worldwide.
Ten dead in Mexican prison riot
MEXICO CITY: Ten people were killed and dozens wounded in a prison riot early yesterday in the central state of San Luis Potosi, local officials said. State police said they had re-established control in an cell block of La Pila prison in the state capital of San Luis Potosi after a fight broke out between prisoners, according to a posting on the security ministry’s official social media page. Authorities were investigating the cause of the riot and it was unclear if inmates belonged to rival drug gangs, whose battles have sparked violence across Mexico. Agencies
