Fla. widow, 84, claims $590M Powerball prize

Fla. widow, 84, claims $590M Powerball prize

TALLAHASSEE, Fla

An 84-year-old Florida widow who bought her Powerball ticket after another customer let her get ahead in line came forward Wednesday to claim the biggest undivided lottery jackpot in history: $590 million.

Gloria C. MacKenzie, a retiree from Maine and a mother of four who lives in a modest, tin-roof house in Zephyrhills, where the lone winning ticket in the May 18 drawing was sold, took her prize in a lump sum of just over $370 million. After federal taxes, she is getting about $278 million, lottery officials said.

TSA drops plan to allow knives on planes

WASHINGTON

The Transportation Security Administration is abandoning a plan to allow passengers to carry small knives, souvenir bats, golf clubs and other sports equipment onto planes in the face of fierce congressional and industry opposition, the head of the agency said Wednesday.

By scuttling the plan to drop the knives and sports equipment from TSA’s list of prohibited items, the agency can focus its attention on other priorities, TSA Administrator John Pistole told The Associated Press.

Flooding in Europe

DRESDEN, Germany

Desperate families were plucked from rooftops by helicopters, cars were swept away by raging torrents and levees failed without warning Wednesday as central Europe staggered under an inland ocean of flooding.

Tens of thousands of people had to be evacuated in Germany and the Czech Republic, and chemical plants along the mighty Danube and Elbe rivers were hastily shut down. City officials, federal troops and emergency workers across a vast region either raced to prepare or struggled to cope as flood crests roared downstream.

Overall, 16 people have died since the beginning of the flooding last week, including eight people in the Czech Republic, five in Germany, two in Austria and one in Slovakia. At least four other people were missing in the Czech Republic, according to the interior minister.

Parole denied for Manson follower

CHINO, Calif.

Former Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten was denied parole Wednesday for the 20th time.

Van Houten, 63, told a California parole board in unprecedented detail how committed she was to the murders Manson ordered and asserted she has changed and is trying to live a life of healing.

But Board of Parole Hearings Commissioner Jeffrey Ferguson told Van Houten she had failed to explain how someone as intelligent and well-bred as she was could have committed the “cruel and atrocious” murders of Leno and Rosemary La Bianca, and the panel rejected her bid.

Soldier pleads guilty to massacre of Afghans

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash.

The American soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians, many of them women and children who were asleep in their villages, pleaded guilty to murder Wednesday and acknowledged to a judge that there was “not a good reason in this world” for his actions.

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’ plea ensures that he will avoid the death penalty for the middle- of-the night slayings that so inflamed tensions with the people of Afghanistan that the American military suspended combat operations there.

1st storm of season

MIAMI

The first tropical storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, Andrea, formed Wednesday over the Gulf of Mexico and was expected to bring wet weather to parts of Florida’s west coast over the next few days.

Forecasters issued a tropical-storm warning for a swath of Florida’s west coast starting at Boca Grande, an island to the northwest of Fort Myers, and ending in the Big Bend area.

In Alabama, authorities said that 13 people had to be rescued from rough surf kicked up by the storm Wednesday at beaches in two coastal towns. Most of those rescued didn’t require medical treatment.

Associated Press