Texas woman sues state lottery commission for unpaid $83 million jackpot
The lawsuit, filed on May 19, says the Montgomery County woman identified as Jane Doe purchased a lottery ticket on the night of Feb. 17 for the 'Lotto Texas' game using the courier service Jackpocket.
The third-party service allows Texans to purchase lottery tickets online from authorized retailers on the customer's behalf. Lottery ticket courier companies are unregulated in Texas. They function by taking lottery ticket orders from players over the phone or online, buying the agreed-upon tickets from licensed lottery retailers and charging fees for purchasing and managing tickets.
Doe's suit says her winning ticket was obtained on her behalf from Winners Corner, a licensed lotto retailer in Austin. The same night of her purchase, her ticket's numbers were drawn for the jackpot prize of $83.5 million, according to the lawsuit.
One week later, the Texas Lottery announced it would be banning the unregulated lottery ticket courier services 'effective immediately.'
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also announced the state would be investigating the win.
'The proliferation of couriers in the state has raised serious concerns that the integrity, security, honesty, and fairness of lottery games is being undermined by the continued activity of courier services,' former Executive Director Ryan Mindell said in the announcement. Mindell resigned in April amid ongoing investigations, and Sergio Rey — who is named in the lawsuit — is now serving as the interim executive director.
A November report from the Texas House found only three states — New York, New Jersey and Arkansas — regulate courier services.
The lawsuit states the commission is 'not allowed to change the rules after the drawing' and is attempting to refuse to pay Doe's winning amount through a retroactive ban.
Doe alleges she presented her ticket to the Texas Lottery Commission on March 18 and was not advised that it was invalid in any way.
'The claim is being reviewed under the Commission's claim validation requirements and is the subject of external investigation,' a spokesperson for the commission told NBC News. 'The agency does not have additional information to provide, as it does not comment on pending litigation and investigations.'
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3 days ago
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The Guardian
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The DOE published the report hours after the EPA announced a plan to roll back 2009's 'endangerment finding', a seminal ruling that provided the legal basis for the agency to regulate climate-heating pollution under the Clean Air Act. If finalized, the move would topple virtually all US climate regulation. In a Fox News interview, Wright claimed the report pushes back on the 'cancel culture Orwellian squelching of science'. But Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University and expert in climate misinformation, said its true purpose is to 'justify what is a scientifically unjustifiable failure to regulate fossil fuels'. 'Science is the basis for climate regulation, so now they are trying to replace legitimate science with pseudoscience,' she said. 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But the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces what is widely considered the gold standard compendium of climate science, compiled by a huge multinational team of scientists, peer reviewed and agreed to by every national government. The latest IPCC synthesis report, released two years ago, was a vast undertaking involving 721 volunteer scientists around the world. It states that it is 'unequivocal' that human activity has heated the planet, which has 'led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people'. By contrast, the Trump administration report was crafted by five handpicked scientists who are seen as having fringe or contrarian views by mainstream climate scientists, with no peer review. The experts behind the report have previously denied being climate deniers. The DOE did not respond to a question about the authors. 'This report had five authors and was rushed over four months, and would not pass muster in any traditional scientific peer review process,' said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at the climate non-profit Berkeley Earth, who called the paper a 'farce'. Wright, the energy secretary, insisted he had not steered the report's conclusions, while Judith Curry, one of the report authors, said in a blog post she hoped the document will push climate science 'away from alarmism and advocacy'. Mainstream climate scientists, however, condemned the findings as distorted and inaccurate. 'This is a report written by a couple of scientists who are outliers in their arguments for climate change,' said Natalie Mahowald, a climate scientist at Cornell University. 'This document does in no way depreciate the value of previous assessments, but rather just cherrypicks the literature to pretend to create a new review.' Mahowald said the lack of peer review means it's 'obviously not as robust' as the IPCC report or the US government's periodic national climate assessment, which the Trump administration recently took offline. The latest national climate assessment, compiled by a dozen government agencies and outside scientists in 2023, concluded that the 'effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States' 'If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different,' Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University, said of the new report. 'The only way to get this report was to pick these authors.' Hausfather agreed that the authors' work 'might represent their views but is not consistent with the broader scientific literature on climate change'. He was among the scientists whose work the authors cited. The new paper includes a chart from a 2019 report which he led, claiming it demonstrates how climate models 'consistently overestimated observations' of atmospheric carbon. But Hausfather's research actually showed that climate models have performed well. 'They appear to have discarded the whole paper as not fitting their narrative, and instead picked a single figure that was in the supplementary materials to cast doubt on models when the whole paper actually confirmed how well they have performed in the years after they were published,' he said. The DOE did not respond to a request for comment about Hausfather's concerns. That approach to research seems to underpin the entire paper, said Hausfather, who is also the climate research lead at tech company Stripe. 'This is a general theme in the report; they cherrypick data points that suit their narrative and exclude the vast majority of the scientific literature that does not,' he said. Dessler said scientists are obliged to engage with the full range of evidence, even if it contradicts their initial assumptions. Ignoring this principle 'can rise to the level of scientific misconduct', he said. 'The report they produced should be thought of as a law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide,' Dessler said. 'Their goal is not to weigh the evidence fairly but to build the strongest possible case for CO2's innocence.' The lack of peer review in the administration's report led to conclusions that deviated, sometimes wildly, from the scientific literature. Many of its claims are based on long-debunked research long promoted by climate deniers, said Mann. 'It is shop worn, decades-old, discredited climate denier talking points, dressed up in the clothing of some sensible new set of revelations,' he said. 'What's different is that it has the imprimatur of the EPA and the federal government now.' 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No widespread bleaching events were recorded on the reef prior to 1998. The report is 'tedious' and at times 'truly wearisome', according to Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University. Kopp recently worked on a paper showing how rising temperatures and drought will worsen crop yields, counter to the report's claims that crops will flourish with extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 'Carbon dioxide fertilization is largely irrelevant to how increasingly extreme heat and intense drought will impact crop yields,' Kopp said. 'As a former department of energy fellow, I'm embarrassed by this report.'
