By STEFANIE DAZIO and SCOTT McFETRIDGE (Associated Press)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Someone who bought a Powerball ticket in Southern California has won a record $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot after more than three months without anyone hitting the top prize.

The winning numbers were selected Tuesday morning, nearly 10 hours after the scheduled Monday night drawing because of problems processing sales data at one of the game’s member lotteries. Lottery officials acknowledged the unprecedented delay for such a high-profile drawing but said the game’s security process took precedence.

“Protecting the integrity of the draw is of utmost importance, and we were able to do that during this historic drawing with the cooperation of all participating lotteries,” said Drew Svitko, the chairman of the Powerball Product Group and executive director of the Pennsylvania Lottery.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Minnesota Lottery acknowledged their sales verification system caused the lengthy delay.

The winning numbers drawn Tuesday morning at the Florida Lottery draw studio in Tallahassee were: white balls 10, 33, 41, 47 and 56, and the red Powerball was 10.

The jackpot ticket was sold at Joe’s Service Center in Altadena, an unincorporated community in the foothills northeast of Los Angeles. For selling the winning ticket, business owner Joe Chahayed will receive a maximum Powerball bonus of $1 million.

“I’m very surprised. Very excited. Very happy,” said Chahayed, who wore a bright yellow California Lottery shirt and cap.

Chahayed said he didn’t know who won the giant prize but hopes it’s someone local.

“I wish I knew the person but most people who buy tickets from me are from the neighborhood. I hope one of them will be the winner,” he said.

Chahayed said he would spend his $1 million on his five children and donate some to the community.

Under California rules, the name of the winner must be disclosed but no other information, including the winner’s address, has to be be made public.

Thomas Murrell said he had stopped at Joe’s Tuesday morning with the intention of buying gas and $200 worth of Powerball tickets, in case no one had won the giant jackpot.

“I know Joe. I’ve known him for years and talk to him all the time,” Murrell said. “Joe’s always been a lucky guy. He’s a good guy. I’m not surprised it happened here.”

The $2.04 billion jackpot was by far the largest lottery prize ever won, topping the previous record $1.586 billion prize won by three Powerball ticketholders in 2016. Only four previous jackpots have topped $1 billion, but none of those are close to the current prize, which started at $20 million back on Aug. 6 and has grown over three winless months. No one has won the jackpot since Aug. 3.

The jackpot was initially reported as an estimated $1.9 billion on Monday, but the prize was increased to $2.04 billion Tuesday morning after updated calculations.

The Multi-State Lottery Association said the scheduled drawing was delayed from 10:59 p.m. EST Monday to 8:57 EST a.m. Tuesday because a participating lottery wasn’t able to process its sales data. After Minnesota completed its pre-draw procedures, the drawing was able to go ahead.

Marie Hinton, a Minnesota Lottery spokeswoman, said the lottery was reviewing what happened and hoped to report its findings by Wednesday.

Terry Rich, a former director of the Iowa Lottery who also served on the Powerball board, said the delay was likely due to a two-part verification system of ticket sales that makes use of an outside vendor to ensure all is in order before the game’s numbers are drawn.

“Each state must verify through a dual process that all of the sales and dollars match before the Multi-State Lottery Association can do the draw,” said Rich, who headed the Iowa Lottery for 10 years and was president of the North American Lottery Association. “This is a state-by-state procedure, which separates the whole process and has been very effective.”

Rich said state lotteries deal with similar problems several times a year but the delays usually don’t attract much attention because the potential jackpots are far less than was up for grabs this week.

The winning numbers and recorded video of the drawing were posted to the Powerball’s YouTube channel.

The $2.04 billion prize is for a winner who chooses an annuity, paid annually over 29 years. Nearly all winners instead opt for cash, which was valued at $997.6 million.

The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 292.2 million.

The game is played in 45 states, as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

McFetridge reported from Des Moines, Iowa.

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The last total lunar eclipse visible in the U.S. for more than two years happens Tuesday overnight, and sky gazers on the West Coast have timing but not the forecast in their favor.

On Tuesday overnight, the sun, Earth and moon will align so that the Earth’s shadow covers the moon. It will be the last total lunar eclipse until March 2025. However, according to NASA, some partial and penumbral eclipses will occur during the next three years.

In case you missed it, here is a look at the total lunar eclipse.

This celestial event is known as the beaver blood moon lunar eclipse, and its totality will be visible to North and Central America, the Pacific, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

The total lunar eclipse will mark the second of the year. The last eclipse happened in May but was only visible to part of the U.S.

When is the November lunar eclipse happening?

In the U.S., the best views of the lunar eclipse will be between 4 a.m. EST (1 a.m. PST) until the moon sets.

Those in the West will have the best opportunity to view the eclipse because totality begins at 5:17 a.m. ET or 2:17 a.m. PT. The Earth’s shadow will cover the entire moon during totality. At this point, the moon will appear to have a copper color.

A lunar eclipse is often called a blood moon because, during an eclipse, the only sunlight reaching the moon passes through Earth’s atmosphere. That leaves red light -- which has a longer wavelength than blue light and is less prone to be scattered out by our atmosphere -- to cast a reddish glow on the lunar surface.

According to NASA, weather can impact how red the moon will look. The more dust and clouds in Earth’s atmosphere, the redder the moon will appear.

By 6:42 a.m. EST when totality ends, the sun will be up on the East Coast, while the West Coast won’t have to compete with sunlight just yet and can enjoy the last moments of the eclipse.

How you view the eclipse also depends on the forecast. You can step outside and look up if you have a clear sky.

How to watch online

If the forecast is not in your favor, there are several ways to watch online.

The Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona will air a live stream on YouTube beginning at 4 a.m. EST (2 a.m. MST).

The Virtual Telescope Project will also carry the lunar eclipse live on YouTube. The show with expert commentary begins at 4:30 a.m. EST.

Troubled forecast for West Coast sky gazers

Sky gazers in the Sierra Nevada may have trouble viewing the eclipse due to the ongoing winter storm casting snowfall, gusty winds, rain and clouds across Northern California, Nevada, Washington and Oregon.

According to the FOX Forecast Center, the first wave of winter weather will move through California from north to south Monday. The second wave arrives late Monday, and rain and heavy mountain snow will persist through Wednesday.

Those in the Northern Rockies need to bundle up before heading outside to look up at the blood moon glow as the coldest air of the season moves in on Monday.

To find out how clear the sky will be in your area Tuesday, download the FOX Weather app and use the plan tab to add the total lunar eclipse for your location.

The first time Avery Hungler’s family tried to celebrate her birthday at Disney World in Orlando, the 2020 COVID-19 shutdowns cancelled the long-awaited trip. This year, they made it down just in time to shelter in place due to Hurricane Ian.

“It’s raining really hard,” the 8-year-old Lowell resident said by phone with her parents, Joe and Bonnie Hungler, from Florida Thursday morning. The Orlando area remained under a tropical storm warning with rain and wind gusts up to 70 mph, and a flash-flood warning.

“I’ve never been in a hurricane before,” Avery said.

It’s an experience she’s not likely to forget, although she also reveals that she slept through the height of the storm Wednesday night.

Her father, Joe, is the executive director of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Lowell. He said that Disney issued a shelter-in-place order Wednesday night, and closed the parks through Thursday.

They’ve been watching the news about the devastation Ian has wreaked on the Fort Myers and Cape Coral communities on the west side of the state that took a direct hit from the Category 4 storm.

“We’re OK,” he said. “The wind was howling — palm trees were blowing sideways — but the resort made sure we were taken care of. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the people in Fort Myers and some of the other places, and it’s horrible. We know we got lucky.”

Hurricane Ian was Joe and Avery’s first hurricane, but Bonnie, who is a director with the Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services, experienced Hurricane Erin in 1995, during a trip to the theme park working as a nanny.

“I was on the property for Hurricane Erin,” she said, “and staying with the family in one of the treehouse villas. A tree fell on our treehouse, and we had to be evacuated by climbing under the tree which was across the door.”

She said Disney evacuated the treehouse villas for Ian, as well as some low-lying buildings, but their first-floor hotel room with an exterior door didn’t experience any flooding from the 16 inches of rain that fell overnight from the storm.

Avery, a second grader at Reilly Elementary School in Lowell’s Belvidere neighborhood, is rolling with the hurricane-related disruptions. One of the few activities she was able to get to before the closures was building a droid at Hollywood Studios.

“We’re going to have a movie marathon today, and I’m going to play with my Jack Sparrow sword and droid,” she said cheerfully.

Almost 100 miles away in Tampa, on the west side of the state, Amaris Castillo and her family are also counting their blessings. The former Dracut residents moved to Florida in 2019. Castillo was a reporter for The Sun from 2016 until the move, reporting on Tyngsboro and Dracut.

She was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., but grew up in the Tampa and Clearwater area. Hurricanes and tropical depressions were an annual Florida event, and at first, she wasn’t worried.

“The last big hurricane to devastate Tampa Bay was in 1921,” she said. “Every year there’s a hurricane season, and they all miss Tampa, so we stayed put.”

Late Monday, though, she started to question that judgment.

“I grew worried when I could feel the panic of other Tampa residents around me,” said Castillo, who now works for the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit media newsroom that owns The Tampa Bay Times. “I went to two gas stations — both out of gas. They had the little plastic bags around the pumps.”

With two small boys, ages 1 and 3, and extended family in the area, Castillo and her husband decided to shelter in place.

“We put up our outside shutters on the first-floor windows,” she said. “And I did a huge grocery trip — water, bread, milk, the basics. I was trying to shop as if we were going to be stranded in our home for a couple of days.”

After taking those precautions, she said, “you just pray and hope for the best.”

Even though Tampa was in the outer bands of the hurricane, Castillo said there was a lot of rain and “howling winds.” By Thursday morning, the storm was lumbering east toward Orlando, and the family got their first look outside.

Some small plants were uprooted, but overall, Castillo said the Tampa area was spared the devastation of other parts of Florida.

“We were lucky, and I am so grateful for that. This was a close one,” she said. “Southwest Florida, like Fort Myers, my heart breaks for Floridians who have real devastation.”

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BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) — Mackenzie Holmes scored 17 points, Sara Scalia added 15 points and No. 11 Indiana beat UMass Lowell 93-37 on Friday night for the fourth largest margin of victory in program history.

Indiana pulled away in the second quarter as UMass Lowell went nine-plus minutes without a field goal. The Hoosiers went on a 23-3 run during the drought and led 49-17 at halftime.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

The struggle for affordable housing is playing out in Vail, Colorado, where the owners of a ski resort are trying to create an affordable housing complex for the chefs, bus drivers, ski lift operators and other workers who keep the resort humming. The problem? A group of bighorn sheep live on a fraction of the land designated for the project. The years-long dispute is nowhere close to being solved, and it's leading local businesses to have a tough time recruiting workers to keep local businesses afloat.

The struggle for affordable housing is playing out in Vail, Colorado, where the owners of a ski resort are trying to create an affordable housing complex for the chefs, bus drivers, ski lift operators and other workers who keep the resort humming. The problem? A group of bighorn sheep live on a fraction of the land designated for the project. The years-long dispute is nowhere close to being solved, and it’s leading local businesses to have a tough time recruiting workers to keep local businesses afloat.

Brothers, teammates and now World Cup rivals. Athletic Bilbao forwards Iñaki and Nico Williams are set to become the latest brothers to play for different countries in a World Cup. Iñaki Williams was selected by Ghana on Monday while his younger brother Nico Williams had been picked by Spain last week. They will be repeating the feat of the Boateng brothers, who played for different nations in 2010 in South Africa and in 2014 in Brazil. Jerome Boateng was a central defender with Germany while the older Kevin-Prince Boateng was an attacking midfielder with Ghana.

The World Cup in Qatar will have an unusually truncated build-up to the tournament. World Cups typically take place in June and July at the end of a traditional European soccer season and teams have about three weeks to prepare. This time teams have about one week between the club season breaking off and the World Cup starting. Players will be in different shape when it comes to sharpness and match rhythm. Coaches must decide whether to play warmup matches to get players ready or keep practice in-house and work on things like team shape in a more controlled environment.

There has never been a World Cup match schedule like this one. Playing in November and December to avoid the desert heat in Qatar helped create other unique features of this 29-day tournament. Players, fans and viewers worldwide have a more intense schedule than any previous World Cup group stage. There are four different match slots on most days, fewer rest days and no pause between the group stage and the round of 16. The tight schedule is the deal FIFA made with domestic leagues and clubs in 2015 to drop the World Cup into the middle of their season.

Only one of the thousands of Mexican fans expected to travel to Qatar can boast of having attended 10 World Cups and more than 450 matches for the country’s national team. His name is Héctor Chávez but he is better known as “Caramelo.” Chávez wears a black charro hat on his head, a green El Tri jersey and carries a Mexican flag with the letters of his native state of Chihuahua embroidered on the front. Chávez says “it’s a lot of sacrifice. I would say it’s even a Via Crucis for so many games I have attended.”

Scott O’Neil has been named CEO for London-based Merlin Entertainments. O’Neil will be responsible for overseeing the business operations and global growth for Merlin Entertainments across its 147 attractions in 24 countries. O’Neil’s appointment Monday comes following outgoing CEO Nick Varney’s decision to retire after 23 years. The 52-year-old O’Neil was the CEO of the parent company that owns the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils. He resigned in June 2021 from Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment.

The Pac-12 is better than it has been in recent years, but is also still eating its own and undercutting its best teams' chances to earn a College Football Playoff berth. The conference has not had a team selected to the CFP since 2016. The Pac-12′s consolation prize for its exciting games and parity, which included two top-10 teams losing at home, is more teams ranked in the AP Top 25 this week than any other league with six. The last time the Pac-12 was the conference with the most ranked teams was Sept. 5, 1995. Reality Check is wondering to rank these Pac-12 teams.

Bust out the victory chains. The Minnesota Vikings proved they’re for real.After piling up wins against losing teams and backup quarterbacks, the Vikings earned a signature victory on the road against the Buffalo Bills. Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers, Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Jeff Saturday and the Indianapolis Colts also made big statements on Sunday. The Vikings overcame a 17-point, second-half deficit in a difficult environment to improve to 8-1 with a thrilling, improbable 33-30 overtime win over Josh Allen and the Bills. There’s no doubting Kirk Cousins anymore. He rallied the Vikings to their fifth win this season when trailing with 2 1/2 minutes or less remaining.

Since its launch in 2020, NBCUniversal has had its share of big events to showcase its Peacock Streaming Service. It gets another one this month with the FIFA Men’s World Cup. With Telemundo as the official Spanish-language broadcaster in the United States, Peacock will simulcast the games and have them available on-demand and other ancillary programming. Rick Cordella, the president of programming for NBC Sports and Peacock Sports, said NBCUniversal was a bit behind its competitors when rolling out a streaming service, but he feels they have closed the gap.

The high-scoring Ohio State Buckeyes have been especially prolific at home. Their 56-14 win over Indiana on Saturday made them the first Big Ten team since the 1903 Michigan Wolverines to score at least 45 points in six straight home games in the same season. That's according to the Elias Sports Bureau. The Buckeyes’ six-game streak with at least 45 points started after they managed just 21 against Notre Dame in the opener. Ohio State is averaging 51 points per home game this season. It's averaging a Bowl Subdivision-high 48.4 points over 45 games at Ohio Stadium since 2016.

Marcus Thuram has been handed the last spot in the France squad that will defend its World Cup title in Qatar while Monaco's uncapped Axel Disasi has also been called after Presnel Kimpembe had to pull out. The French soccer federation said Borussia Mönchengladbach forward Thuram had been added to Didier Deschamps’ list after the coach had summoned only 25 players when he announced his squad last week, leaving one spot open. Paris Saint-Germain defender Kimpembe spoke with Deschamps and the team’s doctor at France’s training ground and told them he did not believe he had sufficiently recovered from an Achilles injury.

The mascots for the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics have been revealed. It's a Phrygian cap. The soft bright red cap is an updated version of a conical hat worn in antiquity. It's also known as a liberty cap. It later became a symbol of the pursuit of liberty in the French Revolution. The Olympic cap mascot is triangular in shape and comes complete with friendly smile, blue eyes, tricolor ribbon and big colored sneakers. The Paralympic version features a prosthetic leg that goes to the knee. Organizers say they didn’t want to choose an animal or other creature but instead wanted something that represented an “ideal.”

Laurette Philipsen found herself resorting to desperate measures to escape the sweltering Florida heat while incarcerated at Lowell Correctional Institution. In the middle of the night, she would sometimes jump in the prison's showers, fully clothed, to cool off.

"Then you'd go back to bed and sleep for about another hour. You'd wake up, and your clothes are totally dry," Philipsen tells New Times. "And you'd get back up and jump in the shower again. And that's how you spent your nights."

Like many Florida prisons, the aging facility near Ocala lacks air conditioning in its dorms. Philipsen consequently spent much of her eight-year sentence at the facility in a constant battle with the heat, finding little relief from fans in the dorms and opening windows for comfort only to welcome bugs that she'd later find crawling in her bed.

"It was very, very difficult," Philipsen says. "I mean, I'm home since 2018 and I cannot imagine with the climate that we have today, living without air conditioning in those facilities."

Philipsen and other prison-reform advocates have long drawn attention to, and questioned, the lack of AC in Florida's prisons, especially as the state continues to see record-breaking temperatures. According to the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC), 18 of its 50 state prisons have air-conditioned dorms. Only about 24 percent of housing units in the state-run prisons have any air conditioning.

But while many facilities still remain without cool air, the Florida Department of Corrections confirmed to New Times that Lowell –– the largest women's prison in the state –– might finally get AC in its housing units.

An FDC spokesperson says the department is testing out a portable AC unit at the facility.

"Recently, FDC welcomed an on-site demonstration to observe a portable evaporative air cooler’s efficiency within a housing unit," the department wrote in a statement to New Times. "After evaluating the unit’s ability to provide supplemental climate control in these units, FDC purchased three of the units to begin a longer-term pilot of the unit and will continue to monitor their performance with an ultimate goal of further mitigating heat while maintaining a safe environment for inmates and staff."

Portable evaporative coolers are a low-cost alternative to the refrigerant-based method used in traditional window air conditioners and central AC systems. The coolers pass hot air around a water source to cause evaporation, producing a stream of moist, cool air — ergo their informal name: swamp coolers. They typically operate at a lower efficiency in humid environments, though manufacturers say the units consume far less energy than traditional AC does.

The department did not immediately respond to additional questions regarding what brand and type of portable evaporative coolers were purchased, how much they cost, and why Lowell was chosen for the pilot.

Opened in April 1956 as the Florida Correctional Institution, the first Florida prison for women, the sprawling facility is situated amid horse farms and racetracks in north-central Florida and can house up to 3,000 women. Lowell has employed a geothermal cooling system in some dorms rather than AC or fans, although agency officials admitted it hasn't worked very well, according to a 2017 Miami Herald article by Julie K. Brown, whose reporting prompted a federal investigation into civil rights abuses at Lowell.

One of Florida's most notorious prisons, Lowell has a history of inmate sexual abuse and mistreatment, with one lawmaker who visited the facility in 2019 describing the conditions inside as "less than human." After a U.S. Department of Justice investigation revealed in 2020 that rampant abuse was swept under the rug by Lowell officials for years, former prisoners pushed to have the facility shut down.

And then there's the lack of AC.

While the FDC maintains that every one of its facilities has some form of climate control — whether it be fans, exhaust systems, or air conditioning — the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative sees the absence of AC in most Florida prisons as a form of human-rights abuse. The group released a report in 2019 characterizing the lack of AC in prisons in Florida and 12 other southern U.S. states as "cruel and unusual punishment."

As previously reported by New Times, after Florida Cares director Denise Rock lobbied then- FDC secretary Julie Jones to stock cooling towels and personal fans for prisoners in 2018, the corrections department began selling the towels and moisture-wicking shirts at the inmate canteen (where prisoners purchase snacks, personal hygiene items, and other items) in 2020.

Philipsen feels the state's move to install AC at Lowell has been a long time coming. She says forcing people to stew in scorching Florida temperatures without cool air is inhumane.

"They [are] incarcerated, but they're still a resident of the state, and the legislative body is responsible for all residents in the State of Florida." she says. "You can't pick and choose who you want to be responsible for."