Fri: DeathSentence Screws Florida Again, Again, and Again

This is One Lucky Guy.  Twice!

A store clerk and colleague are accused of stealing a $3m (£2.4m) lottery ticket left behind by a customer.

State lottery officials in Massachusetts contacted police after Carly Nunes, 23, presented a ticket that was torn and burned.

Ms Nunes and colleague Joseph Reddem, 32, were also overheard arguing over their claims to the winning jackpot.

The original buyer of the ticket has been identified and will claim his prize as intended.

Plymouth County prosecutors said the man had purchased four tickets as well as a bag of potato chips from the Savas Liquors store in Lakeville on 17 January.

Ms Nunes, the clerk at the checkout counter, rang up the order but only printed two tickets, and the man left the store without his winning tickets.

That evening, his numbers were called, but the man concluded he had lost the tickets after a brief search.

Two days later, Mr Reddem drove Ms Nunes and her boyfriend to the state lottery headquarters, where she submitted her claim and redeemed the prize.

But shortly thereafter, according to prosecutors, officials overheard Mr Reddem demanding a share of the jackpot from Ms Nunes in the building's lobby. She allegedly said she would "only pay him $200,000".

Lottery investigators also questioned Ms Nunes over the poor condition her ticket was in, and opened an investigation.

Surveillance video from Savas Liquors soon revealed how Ms Nunes had obtained the ticket and, in a follow-up interview, she told police she had "inadvertently obtained" the ticket, prosecutors said.

A grand jury indicted Ms Nunes last Friday on one count each of larceny from a building, attempted larceny, presentation of a false claim and witness intimidation, and Mr Reddem on one count of attempted extortion. They will be arraigned at a later date.

Police spent nearly a month working to find the true owner of the winning ticket, canvassing the area, posting flyers of the man seen in surveillance footage and questioning local residents.

The Massachusetts State Lottery Commission has said it will honour his claim to the $3m jackpot.

Who is More Frightening, Granny With a Knife or AR-15 Guy?

A 95-year-old woman is in critical condition after police in Australia shocked her with a stun gun as she approached them with a walking frame and a steak knife at her nursing home.

Clare Nowland, who has dementia, was taken down by a senior constable, Peter Cotter, the assistant commissioner of New South Wales Police told a news conference Friday.

At the time, "she was approaching police, but it is fair to say at a slow pace,” he said. “She had a walking frame, but she had a knife.”

He added that an internal investigation had been launched into the incident Wednesday at the Yallambee Lodge nursing home in Cooma, a small town around 240 miles south of Sydney.

After responding to a call about a patient having a knife in her possession, Cotter said Nowland was found in a “small confined” treatment room by two officers who arrived at the scene.

“Negotiations commenced for her to drop the knife. For whatever reasons, Clare did not do that,” he said, adding that the senior constable activated his stun gun, which are widely known as Tasers after a major manufacturer.

“I can’t take it any further as to what was going through anyone’s mind,” Cotter said.

The 5-foot-2 woman, who weighs 95 pounds, fell to the ground and struck her head.



Jamie Sparrow, a Severn Elementary School parent, recorded a cell phone video Wednesday showing the man with an AR-15 in his hands at the bus stop where his 6-year-old daughter gets off. Parents said the man, J'den McAdory, has been there for drop-offs for weeks. McAdory said what he's doing is not about scaring parents or children -- it's about protesting the recent gun control measures Gov. Wes Moore signed into law.

"Guns can be safe if it's controlled by the right person," McAdory said. "I really wasn't coming out here for the kids. I was coming out here to show people that this is legal."

3 Billion Reason Zelensky is Smiling

The Pentagon overestimated the value of the ammunition, missiles and other equipment it sent to Ukraine by around $3 billion, a Senate aide and a defense official said on Thursday, an error that may lead the way for more weapons being sent to Kyiv for its defense against Russian forces.

The error was the result of assigning a higher than warranted value on weaponry that was taken from U.S. stocks and then shipped to Ukraine, two senior defense officials said on Thursday.

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"We've discovered inconsistencies in how we value the equipment that we've given" to Ukraine one of the senior defense officials told Reuters. The officials and the Senate aide spoke on the condition of anonymity. Congress is being notified of the accounting adjustment on Thursday, the sources said.

The defense official said it is possible the amount of overvalued weaponry could grow beyond $3 billion as the Pentagon examines the situation more thoroughly.

In its accounting, the Pentagon used replacement cost to value the weapons aid, instead of the weaponry's value when it was purchased and depreciated, the senior defense officials said.

We Need More Transformers



No, Not Those.  These.



As COVID-19 ripped through the global economy in 2020, Ford stopped assembly lines at automotive factories from Michigan to Mexico. The old textile mill in the central Pennsylvania town of Sunbury that had survived the country’s last big wave of fabric plant closures shut down for good. The Texas oil fields that had made the United States a rival to Saudi Arabia in crude exports halted production.

At ERMCO Inc., a Tennessee-based manufacturer of electrical transformers, the factory floors were humming. Orders were coming in faster than ever before from the rural electric cooperatives ERMCO serves. The pandemic may have mangled many manufacturers’ supply chains, but ERMCO’s 10 facilities in states like Illinois, Indiana and Georgia kept pace with the record sales.

“In 2020, we produced more transformers than in the history of our company,” said ERMCO chief executive Tim Mills. “2021 topped that record year.”

This may only be the start of the boom, and demand may soon pick up as federal dollars from President Joe Biden’s landmark climate-spending laws begin to flow. But Mills said a new regulation meant to make transformers more energy-efficient is making it impossible to go all-in on clearing an ever-growing backlog of orders.

The resulting shortage has kept builders from completing new homes and hiked the cost of replacing power lines destroyed in storms by double or more. Transformers that once took weeks to obtain now require up to a year or more of waiting. Utilities say the crisis may be getting worse, threatening to slow the shift away from fossil fuels and increase blackouts in a country where the average household is already losing power for twice as long compared to 10 years ago.

Transformers come in hundreds of shapes and sizes, the most visible of which tend to be those housed in the metal cylinders mounted atop electrical poles. The job of large transformers in particular is to convert rivers of up to 750,000 volts into the 240-volt trickle most homes are designed to safely receive. Smaller transformers serve similar functions as electricity flows along transmission lines from power stations to substations and into homes and businesses.

Virtually every home is connected to a transformer, meaning demand for transformers historically kept pace with new housing construction.

Not anymore. Extreme storms and wildfires are destroying hundreds of transformers at a time, steadily eating into utilities’ stockpiles of the machines. That leaves even fewer to go around now that the U.S. is finally gearing up to upgrade its power grid, more than one-quarter of which was built at least half a century ago.

But it’s not just about replacing the existing grid. The U.S. needs to expand its power system to handle its two fastest-growing sources of electricity, solar and wind, which require bigger distribution networks to balance the power load when the output from panels and turbines fluctuates with the weather. If that weren’t enough, federal researchers estimate that charging cars and powering heating and cooking appliances with electricity could increase overall demand on the grid by nearly 40% over the next 27 years. All that requires more transformers.

The Check Was Not in the Mail

Paltry cybersecurity and slow-moving bureaucracy at the U.S. Postal Service meant hundreds of mail carriers, handlers and service clerks fell victim to a complex direct deposit scheme that left them without pay and angry that the federal government had failed to heed multiple warnings.

Postal leaders downplayed the incident, telling USA TODAY in a statement that they first were notified in December about an “unusual log-in activity involving a limited number of employees.”

In reality, cybercriminals had for months lured employees searching for their payroll system with a mirror-image-like website that reportedly tricked hundreds of employees into providing their usernames and passwords. The bad actors then used that information to sign in to the real system and reroute employees’ paychecks.

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That left employees like Atlanta mail handler Joe Hoagland in a serious pinch for cash.

When the paychecks stopped, Hoagland initially figured his credit union had screwed up. Then his paystub revealed $900 had been siphoned off. When his supervisor finally told him there had been a security problem, Hoagland was furious.

“I’m the primary breadwinner in my family; this isn’t 200 bucks, this is $900 out of my check,” Hoagland said. “They knew about it for weeks and dragged their feet on telling us.”

Vanishing paychecks: How hundreds of USPS workers fell prey to a fake website scam