Mega Millions winner opts for annual payments

Mega Millions winner opts for annual payments

LANSING, Mich. — The meltdown on Wall Street is even starting to affect lottery winners.

Michigan Lottery officials say the winner of a $42 million Mega Millions jackpot has indicated a preference for getting the winnings over 26 years rather than taking a lump cash payment.

The winner will be announced today at a Lansing news conference.

Lottery spokeswoman Andi Brancato says she can’t remember a Mega Millions winner in Michigan ever taking the annuity payments since the game was launched in 2002. The last Michigan resident to claim an annuity won the Million Dollar Raffle last January.

Given the market’s volatility, 26 years of steady payments looks like a better bet than investing cash winnings.

House offered for free, but you have to move it

KAYSVILLE, Utah — Is the credit crunch keeping you from getting a home loan? Well, here’s a little beauty you can have for free.

You just have to pay to haul it away.

Jacquie Jones of Kaysville, Utah, is offering a three-bedroom brick bungalow built in 1910. She says the home has to make way for new houses she’s building on the lot.

She says the home was featured in one of the “Benji” movies and an episode of “Touched By An Angel.”

She would rather give it away than see it bulldozed. She says it would cost at least $18,000 to lift the house and take the garage, more depending on the distance of the move.

Police: Ky. man killed wife, daughter, self

INDEPENDENCE, Ky. — A man found dead this week after a gasoline-fueled blaze at his Kentucky house shot and killed his wife and daughter before turning the gun on himself, police said Thursday.

Police and firefighters also came under fire when they arrived Tuesday night at the burning home where they found the three bodies inside and a toddler wandering outside, unharmed.

In a release Thursday, police said autopsies and other evidence show 43-year-old Seaward Padilla shot 45-year-old Lori Padilla and 22-year-old Jessica Padilla on Tuesday night. All three died from gunshot wounds; Jessica’s 2-year-old daughter, Jaycee, was unharmed.

Slaying followed fight over clothing purchase

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The fatal shooting of a store employee and gunbattle with police in a Knoxville shopping mall began as a complaint over a clothing purchase, authorities said Thursday.

William Johnson — who faces charges of murder, aggravated kidnapping and attempted murder in the Wednesday shootings — acted alone and targeted the store, police spokesman Darrell DeBusk said.

Johnson, 42, came to the shopping center around 4:20 p.m. Wednesday determined to get satisfaction from Reno Mens Wear for clothing he had bought there.

Minutes after Johnson entered the store, 29-year-old employee Ahmed Nahl was dead and Johnson was being taken to a hospital for wounds in the leg and arm after a shootout with two police officers.

Panama Canal project getting $400M loan

PANAMA CITY, Panama — The Panama Canal expansion project is getting a $400 million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank.

Panama Canal Authority administrator Alberto Aleman said Thursday that the IDB’s approval of the loan demonstrates confidence in the project “despite the world financial crisis.”

The $5.25 billion project to construct two wider locks is expected to double the 50-mile canal’s capacity. They are scheduled for completion by 2014.

The Panama Canal Authority is borrowing up to $2.3 billion between 2009 and 2011 to help finance the project. It expects to pay that back by increasing ship tolls an average of 3.5 percent a year.

The waterway now moves about 5 percent of the world’s cargo.

Nobel laureate dead at 95

DEL MAR, Calif. —Dr. George Palade, the University of California, San Diego, Nobel laureate whose work isolating, imaging and identifying the function of minute organelles within cells prompted the Nobel committee to label him and his co-winners the fathers of cell biology, died Tuesday at his home here after a long illness. He was 95.

Combined dispatches