Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Saturday, October 27, 2007
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Friday, October 19, 2007
Arnold Schwarzenegger to Lease State Lottery
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced proposals last week to generate two billion dollars a year to help pay for universal health insurance by leasing the state's lottery. Many experts feel that one way to make the lottery more attractive to bidders is to allow it to undergo a technological transformation that would include the use of equipment such as video lottery terminals resembling slot machines.
'The less constraints, the higher the value,” said Steve Juarez of JPMorgan Chase.
Juarez and other experts at the informational hearing stated that rolling back restraints in the 23-year-old initiative that authorised the lottery would entice more players and boost the current three billion dollars in annual sales and also the long-term value of the games.
However, Fred Jones, an attorney for Californians Against Gambling Expansion, said any such change would be ‘more like going from bows and arrows to fully automatic weapons’ aimed at the poor. The lottery, he said, is part of the gambling industry that mimics a regressive tax that disproportionately hurts low-income people.
'This is very much a political matter and a very important public policy transaction,' said Kathleen Brown, the former State Treasurer and current Head of West Coast Operations for Wall Street investment firm Goldman Sachs.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
$13 Million Lotto Winner Shares Journey To Jackpot
He'd already won $100,000 twice and another $50,000 along the way, but this time it was more.
Jose Salmon was so sure that he'd hit it big one day, that since 1998, he was spending $600 a day on lottery tickets.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Accountants win $15M in lottery
Staff Reporter
It takes more than a winning lottery ticket to change an accountant.
Of the 15 accountants splitting Wednesday's $15,477,335 Lotto 6/49 jackpot, nearly everyone plans to use the winnings to pay off bills and mortgages or make some strategic investments.
Not Dianne Sherring. She's buying her husband a boat.
"He's wanted one for years," Sherring said as she and her colleagues picked up their cheque at the Ontario Lottery and Gaming prize centre yesterday afternoon.
Now, she said, he can have one.
The group – colleagues from the Burlington waste management firm Newalta Industrial Services – has been buying lottery tickets together for roughly eight years, and always picks the same numbers, said another winner, Jim Vallance.
It's only happenstance that there are 15 of them and $15 million to share, Vallance said.
"It's a coincidence," the Grimsby resident said.
Still reeling from the news, the new millionaires struggled to contain their high spirits long enough to pose for photographers.
"Yahoo!" whooped fellow winner Doug Steeves as he gave a happy dance for the cameras.
Sherring's hands shook as she passed the cheque – a regular one, not an oversized novelty – to her colleagues.
Though the winning numbers were revealed Wednesday night, the group didn't know its luck until the following morning.
Sherring, the group co-ordinator, was too busy to check on Wednesday, like she usually does.
When she got to work yesterday morning, co-worker Sandra Cooper, another winner, insisted she look up the results online.
"Dianne and I both hate our jobs," Cooper joked when asked about her urgency.
(Two of the winners plan to retire in light of their windfall, but not Sherring and Cooper.)
Sherring caved in to the pressure and logged on to the lottery website.
"By the time I got to the fourth number, my heart was beating fast," she said. "By the time I got to the sixth number, it was like `Oh, my God!'"
The pair's resounding shrieks of "Oh, my God" soon alerted the entire seven-floor office building.
"I think all of Burlington knows," Steeves quipped.
"It was just like the commercial," Sherring said.
The winners come from Grimsby, Hamilton, Smithville and St. Catharines. They are between 32 and 70 years old.