(Reuters) - No one won the multi-state Powerball on Wednesday as the jackpot grew to at least $415 million, vaulting it into the top 10 highest U.S. lottery prizes in history, officials said.
The winning numbers from Wednesday's draw were 30, 47, 57, 66, 69 and the Powerball number was 3, lottery officials said.
The Powerball jackpot has grown past $300 million for the first time since January, when three tickets for the game split $1.6 billion, a record for any U.S. lottery.
Seventeen consecutive drawings have produced no winner, lottery officials said.
The odds of winning at Powerball are one in 292 million, which according to statistics experts is equivalent to flipping a coin 28 times and getting heads every time.
According to the Powerball website, no one matched all six numbers and won the jackpot on Wednesday as the prize reached about $415 million. The amount placed it in the top 10 of U.S. lottery prizes ever, California lottery spokesman Alex Traverso said. The next drawing would be on Saturday.
Powerball is played in 44 states, including California, which is the nation's most populous state, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Even as lottery officials gear up for this latest drawing, they are still waiting for one ticket holder to come forward from the record $1.6 billion Powerball drawing in January.
Lottery officials still have no idea who bought the ticket, sold in Chino Hills east of Los Angeles, Traverso said. Under the rules of the game, the holder has a year from the time of the drawing to claim a prize.
The two other winning tickets were sold in Tennessee and Florida, and those winners have come forward.
(Reuters) - No one won the multi-state Powerball on Wednesday as the jackpot grew to at least $415 million, vaulting it into the top 10 highest U.S. lottery prizes in history, officials said.
The winning numbers from Wednesday's draw were 30, 47, 57, 66, 69 and the Powerball number was 3, lottery officials said.
The Powerball jackpot has grown past $300 million for the first time since January, when three tickets for the game split $1.6 billion, a record for any U.S. lottery.
Seventeen consecutive drawings have produced no winner, lottery officials said.
The odds of winning at Powerball are one in 292 million, which according to statistics experts is equivalent to flipping a coin 28 times and getting heads every time.
According to the Powerball website, no one matched all six numbers and won the jackpot on Wednesday as the prize reached about $415 million. The amount placed it in the top 10 of U.S. lottery prizes ever, California lottery spokesman Alex Traverso said. The next drawing would be on Saturday.
Powerball is played in 44 states, including California, which is the nation's most populous state, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Even as lottery officials gear up for this latest drawing, they are still waiting for one ticket holder to come forward from the record $1.6 billion Powerball drawing in January.
Lottery officials still have no idea who bought the ticket, sold in Chino Hills east of Los Angeles, Traverso said. Under the rules of the game, the holder has a year from the time of the drawing to claim a prize.
The two other winning tickets were sold in Tennessee and Florida, and those winners have come forward.
(Reuters) - No one won the multi-state Powerball on Wednesday as the jackpot grew to at least $415 million, vaulting it into the top 10 highest U.S. lottery prizes in history, officials said.
The winning numbers from Wednesday's draw were 30, 47, 57, 66, 69 and the Powerball number was 3, lottery officials said.
The Powerball jackpot has grown past $300 million for the first time since January, when three tickets for the game split $1.6 billion, a record for any U.S. lottery.
Seventeen consecutive drawings have produced no winner, lottery officials said.
The odds of winning at Powerball are one in 292 million, which according to statistics experts is equivalent to flipping a coin 28 times and getting heads every time.
According to the Powerball website, no one matched all six numbers and won the jackpot on Wednesday as the prize reached about $415 million. The amount placed it in the top 10 of U.S. lottery prizes ever, California lottery spokesman Alex Traverso said. The next drawing would be on Saturday.
Powerball is played in 44 states, including California, which is the nation's most populous state, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Even as lottery officials gear up for this latest drawing, they are still waiting for one ticket holder to come forward from the record $1.6 billion Powerball drawing in January.
Lottery officials still have no idea who bought the ticket, sold in Chino Hills east of Los Angeles, Traverso said. Under the rules of the game, the holder has a year from the time of the drawing to claim a prize.
The two other winning tickets were sold in Tennessee and Florida, and those winners have come forward.
Many of the largest U.S. investment funds, including pensions, are doing nothing to protect their investors' savings from the financial risks posed by climate change, according to an analysis by the Asset Owners Disclosure Project, a nonprofit. At least 117 American funds, with a combined $4.6 trillion in assets, have taken no action to mitigate the risks associated with a warming planet.
“It simply isn’t professional for the funds to do nothing,” Julian Poulter, the group's CEO, told The Huffington Post.
Indeed, there have been warning signs for quite some time that big investors, from a purely financial perspective, need to think hard about fossil fuels. The S&P 500 stock index is up around 50 percent from 10 years ago. Oil stocks over the same period are up just over 1 percent.
And business is arguably only going to get harder. Global financial regulators are starting to work out a standard system for companies to voluntarily disclose climate risks, the governor of the Bank of England has warned insurance companies that they're at risk of being wiped out by climate change, and Saudi Arabia wants to kick its oil habit.
A 2013 report from England's Institute and Faculty of Actuaries found that under business-as-usual policies, resource scarcity associated with a changing climate could stall the global economy and cause pension funds to be unable to pay out benefits.
So what should a prudent pension fund manager do? “There are many ways to skin the climate-risk cat,” Poulter said. Funds can engage with fossil fuel companies and try to push companies to deal with the climate-related risk they face. Or they can choose to screen out companies that haven’t come to grips with that risk. They can invest in renewable energy firms and other companies that will prosper in a low-emissions world. And since the funds we're talking about are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, they could realistically do a little bit of all of the above.
The point of the analysis isn’t to be prescriptive or legalistic in telling pension funds what they should or shouldn’t do. It’s to push them to understand the reality of the climate risk embedded in their investments, and explain to their members -- whose retirements are on the line -- what they are doing (or not), and why.
What Poulter wants is for pension fund managers to realize that they can’t ignore climate change. When oil is at $43 dollars a barrel, the Paris agreement is striving to keep global temperatures from rising and “you’ve the likes of Saudi Arabia selling their main asset because they see an oil-free world,” it’s just not acceptablefor pension funds to act like nothing is happening.
Sometimes good ideas come wrapped in incredibly dumb packages. I'm looking at you Crystal Pepsi. The dungbomb we're talking about today, however, isn't a weird carbonated drink but a new workplace leave concept: "me-ternity leave."
It is the brainchild of Meghann Foye, a former editor for Redbookmag.com and Seventeen magazine who’s written a novel by that name about a woman who fakes a pregnancy to get a break from the office.
NYPost.com
The term “me-ternity leave,” if you parse Foye’s unfortunate statements, apparently just means a paid sabbatical from work, time off that is longer than a vacation. Who wouldn’t like that? We could all use an extended break to recharge and avoid burning out. College professors have long enjoyed sabbaticals, and a number of enlightened companies offer them as a perk.
But Foye made the disastrous mistake of linking this concept up with maternity leave, telling the New York Post last week that she wanted all the “perks” of maternity leave without having a baby.
Of course, the mothers of the Internet went nuts.
Unless you're a masochist. Then yes, maternity is a 'break' like #meternity . A messy, bloody, poopy, sleep deprived vacation.
— Sheila Nagig (@TheSheilaNagig) April 30, 2016
Slept half the night on the couch with the baby because he cried every hour unless he was held. "Me time." #meternity
— S (@suzgraggen) April 30, 2016
It’s hard to believe that Foye, a longtime women’s magazine editor, didn’t see the backlash coming. A representative for Foye said she didn't have time to respond to HuffPost's questions about her concept.
The Internet freakout was so harsh that Foye then wrote another piece for the Post defending her position. “Now I do think of meternity as a sabbatical -- a time off to take stock, pause and figure out if what we are doing in our lives is working for us,” she wrote. “I’m not saying maternity leave is a sabbatical.”
Unfortunately, that's exactly what Foye said.
After the #Meternity backlash, what if Meghann Foye's next book is about building a new you through the Witness Protection Program?
— Beth Markley (@bethmarkley) April 30, 2016
Most white-collar workers today are expected to be constantly connected to work, without much time away to truly disconnect. Even when we're given permission to be out of the office, many of us have bright shiny iPhones that lure us back with a constant stream of notifications and beeps and the promise of instant distraction.
Some elite employers like Deloitte, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Boston Consulting Group, as well as tech firms like Adobe and Autodesk, give their employees paid sabbaticals after they’ve worked a certain number of years.
REI offers a four-week paid sabbatical to those who’ve worked there for at least 15 years. Employees get another one for every five years worked after that. This is obviously awesome.
“It’s hard to imagine another employer who would teach me to paddle, encourage me to dream, help me assemble my kit and pay me to play with whales, wolves, and bears,” writes a long-time REI employee of his time away from work canoeing on the West Coast.
Some people use sabbaticals to travel; others to volunteer or spend time with family or on a creative project.
“The intention is to help the employee reset and come back rejuvenated and refreshed – as an enhanced worker (not to mention human being),” Fortune magazine explains.
That seems to be what Foye wants for everyone. She took her own self-imposed sabbatical from 2010 to 2012 to write her book and travel. It's too bad she’s wrapped the concept up with paid parental leave.
Maternity leave is a lot of wonderful things -- but, especially for first-time parents, it’s a crazy, sleep-deprived period of time in which your entire life is turned upside-down. For birth mothers, it’s also physically devastating as your body recovers from producing a new human. Without having experienced it, Foye might not quite understand.
A sabbatical is geared to one individual's enrichment. It also benefits his or her employer who gets a more loyal, possibly more creative, less stressed out worker.
But parental leave is a bigger deal. It is a public good -- enabling citizens to tend to the next generation of workers and improving overall health. Babies that have a parent at home during their early years are healthier -- increased maternity leave reduces infant mortality rates -- and women who get that time off are less likely to suffer from depression. Paternity leave even helps foster gender equality in the workplace.
Parental leave is also unfortunately a benefit that most workers in the U.S. do not get. We're the only developed country to have no paid leave policy for new mothers.
Foye doesn't seem to get all that. She told the Post that having a baby gives women a break from work, helping prevent burnout and serving to help you set the boundaries between your work life and your personal life. “Women are bad at putting ourselves first. But when you have a child, you learn how to self-advocate to put the needs of your family first,” Foye said. “A well-crafted 'meternity' can give you the same skills.”
She suggested maternity leave offered mothers a chance for self-reflection. Critics disagreed.
“What did you gals reflect on during the first weeks and months of your child’s life? A few things that came to mind for me were: Exactly how little sleep can I get and still be able to drive a car and remember not to leave the stove on? How much blood can I lose from my vagina and remain alive?” writes Valerie Williams on ScaryMommy.com.
Let's hope Foye is using her time after suggesting these things for a little self-reflection of her own.
One of the promises of online banking is that you can get an app to do your budgeting for you. It's something that feels necessary in a post-Great Recession world: Real household incomes have been falling over the last decade and a half, and people have to keep track of their money because they have less to spend than they once did.
The idea is that by tracking your spending, you can avoid the kind of profligacy that leads to budget downfall. Unfortunately for most Americans, budgeting isn't really the problem.
Keeping track of every happy hour drink may help on the margins, but for most people, financial problems are caused by things like losing a job or getting sick. The real problem is not that you aren't budgeting -- it's that the costs of housing, college and health care have skyrocketed in the last 50 years. No app can keep you from overspending on rent, needing to pay back student loans or medical debt, or suffering through bouts of unemployment.
That hasn't stopped banks from trying.
Ally Bank’s new app, Splurge Alert, is sort of like a reverse-Yelp. It uses geolocation to alert people when they're approaching stores and restaurants where they tend to spend money unnecessarily. Warning! You're entering a high-spending zone! In the promotional video, Drew Scott, the co-star of popular HGTV show "Property Brothers," admits to a bad habit of buying antique swords. ("I’m not a violent person," he says. "I just like deadly medieval weapons.")
It’s an interesting take on budgeting gamification. But who, exactly, is this helping?
"I can imagine a very limited set of situations where this kind of thing might be helpful," said Abigail Sussman, a marketing professor at the University of Chicago who studies how people make purchasing decisions. She said this approach might be useful if a person already knows they have a problem with a particular type of spending, and they're making a conscious effort to steer clear of it. But when it comes to specific harmful spending habits, this kind of self-awareness is actually pretty rare.
There are more broadly helpful versions of mobile banking. Citi, for example, lets its customers see basic details about how much money is in their checking account on the app homepage, without signing in. Simple, an online bank that prides itself on customer service, has a proprietary tool called "safe-to-spend," which shows you how much discretionary cash there is in your account, automatically subtracting the money you spend regularly on things like rent and utilities.
But again, that kind of thing only helps with a small percentage of irregular purchases. There's a story in The Atlantic this month about a man -- a film critic -- who barely has two pennies to rub together, despite all the outward signals of being well off. He owns a house, has published many books and is well-known as a writer. He has a child who went to Harvard Medical School. But, he explains, he and his wife have no retirement funds and no savings as a result of a little bit of bad luck, and some very poor choices on his part.
Would any of these apps help this man? Probably not. His problem is his lifestyle, not his day-to-day spending. He was paying two mortgages for several years because he and his family moved during a market downturn -- in Brooklyn and East Hampton, no less, two of the most expensive housing markets in the country. His wife quit her job when their children were young, then had trouble finding her way back into the workforce. They sent their children to private school. Almost no amount of restaurant-splurging stacks up against years of five-figure private school tuition.
As part of the app’s launch, Ally commissioned a third-party online survey by Harris Poll on people’s splurging habits. While 85 percent of people said that they occasionally splurge on things, only 7 percent said they do it once a month or more. The most common splurges by far fell into the “food and drink” or “clothes and shoes” categories, both of which usually end up being relatively small amounts of money compared to, say, rent.
Meanwhile, a recent report by the Federal Reserve showed that 47 percent of Americans say they don’t have $400 to spare in an emergency, suggesting that splurging isn’t the big problem for most people’s budgets.
In a 2012 paper on what motivates consumer spending, sociologist Jeff Lundy found that splurging on things like clothes and restaurants is usually a sign that a person is accumulating wealth, rather than the opposite. “The best predictors of both wealth losses and reduced wealth accumulation were adverse circumstances which tend to overwhelm a household’s budget,” the paper says.
And no app can bring back the erosion of Americans' incomes since 1999. But that app certainly would be cool.
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Years ago, when Denise Morrison told her boss she planned to take a temporary leave from work to have her first baby, she knew this wouldn’t be welcome news to the higher-ups.
She said she was among the first of her female colleagues to have a baby.
"I told my boss, ‘Pretend I have a broken leg,’” Morrison, now president and CEO of the Campbell Soup Company, told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. “He said, ‘What?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m going to be out for about six weeks. I can still read my mail, I can still work, I just can’t go into the stores.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You don’t have a broken leg,’ and I said, ‘Yes, but I’m pregnant.’”
Now Morrison is trying to make things easier for the next generation of parents. On Thursday, she announced Campbell’s first company-wide parental leave policy, a gender-neutral package that guarantees 10 paid weeks off for a primary caregiver, and two for a secondary caregiver, after a birth or adoption. The policy is flexible, meaning she has instructed the human resources department to be open to individual arrangements to meet employees’ needs.
“We’ve been watching the market,” Morrison said, referring to the groundswell of companies announcing stronger parental leave policies over the last year. “We are all about millennial mothers, and this is really good for consumers. Putting those factors together, I just said it’s time.”
It’s not just mothers, though critics say requiring parents to designate a “primary" caregiver may mean the so-called parental policy will still effectively be about women. Offering less time to the “secondary” caregiver -- in most cases, the father -- can also make it harder for primary caregivers to restart their careers after going on leave. A recent study of 22,000 companies around the world found that countries with the highest percentages of women in leadership, including at the boardroom and executive levels, offered fathers 11 times more paternity leave days than countries with the lowest percentages of female leaders.
Still, Campbell’s gender-neutral program may be more welcoming to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer families.
“Families today are a mosaic,” Morrison said. “Families will decide different roles in their lives. The expectation is that we as a company will be flexible.”
Campbell’s new policy may be inclusive, but it’s still not particularly generous. Netflix, which last year ignited corporate focus on parental leave with its own new policy, offers up to a year off. Facebook provides four months for moms and dads. Music streaming giant Spotify gives up to six months of leave. Etsy, the hand-crafted goods seller, announced a “basically perfect” policy last month, offering men and women up to 26 paid weeks off. Even The Nation, a magazine struggling with the drop in print advertising, now gives staffers up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave.
The Huffington Post
What makes Campbell’s move notable is that the company is a 147-year-old food giant, not exactly a cultural bedfellow with 21st-century tech firms or leftist magazines. The parental leave announcement marks yet another step in the Camden, New Jersey-based behemoth’s transformation under Morrison.
In many ways, that journey began with the acquisition of baby-food brand Plum Organics in June 2013.
Campbell bought the startup just as Plum was seeking to become certified as a so-called benefit corporation. Benefit corporations must meet the rigid environmental and social good standards outlined by the nonprofit B Lab. The designation provides companies with the same thing that LEED certification brings buildings: a public indicator that they're one of the good guys. A month after Campbell's acquisition, Plum became the first benefit corporation ever owned by a public company.
“In doing that, it set a higher standard for our whole company,” Morrison said. “There’s been a steady drumbeat of change.”
Until now, that change has been most evident in Campbell's food policies. Last July, the company vowed to remove all artificial flavors and colors from its foods by 2018. In January, the company said it would begin labeling all U.S. food products that contain genetically modified organisms and even publicly advocated for a national mandatory GMO label. As the name implies, Plum Organics built its brand selling non-GMO foods.
Campbell’s parental leave announcement marks the first major initiative that emulates the way its Plum subsidiary treats its workers.
Plum Organics had offered eight weeks of paid maternity leave and two weeks of paid paternity leave. Now, women or men who are primary caregivers at Plum can take 10 paid weeks off. Though secondary caregivers' leave remains unchanged at two weeks, the gender designations go away.
“We think about our benefits for parents holistically, meaning we’re not just looking at parental leave -- we’re also doing everything we can to make sure our employees are being fully supported once they’re back in the office,” a Plum Organics spokeswoman told HuffPost.
Campbell may be getting with that part of the program, too. The company plans to expand the daycare nursery at its Camden headquarters, which has been there for the last 25 years. A Campbell spokeswoman declined to comment on other pending workplace initiatives.
“If we make it easier and more flexible for women and men to have good careers and good families,” Morrison said, “then that’s a step in the right direction.”
Still, as HuffPost’s Emily Peck explained last year, corporate America has a long way to go.
Yet for all the positive momentum on leave, the data still looks bleak. An overwhelming majority of employers don’t offer paid leave. Most states don’t offer paid leave. The U.S. unpaid leave law — the Family and Medical Leave Act — only covers 60 percent of workers.
About 9 percent of workers who take time off to care for a family member end up on public assistance, according to Labor Department data cited by the New Republic. The Family Act, a bill sponsored by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D–Conn.) that would pay for federally mandated leave by taking a few cents out of employee paychecks, is stalled out.
So, for now, change may have to come on a company-by-company basis.
“I talk publicly about the seismic shifts happening not only in demographics but in family,” Morrison said. “For the first time at Campbell, we’re seeing that shift live in our workforce and in our world headquarters and now company-wide.”
