A ticket sold in Illinois is the sole winner of the $1.34 billion Mega Millions jackpot, the second-largest lottery prize in the game’s 20-year history, according to results posted Saturday.
Why it matters: The jackpot rolled 29 times since April and if no one won Friday's drawing lottery officials said the prize had the potential to grow to $1.7 billion for Tuesday's drawing, which would have been the nation’s largest lottery prize.
The 2022 Atlantic hurricane season is likely to be unusually active, with worrisome signs in parts of the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.
The big picture: While hurricane forecasters' main tools are provided by the federal government — such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Air Force hurricane hunters, satellites and computer models — startups are playing a growing role in forecasting.
Insurance startups are eyeing the climate space as historical models struggle to keep up, but experimental underwriting models may not be a silver bullet.
Why it matters: Insurance models have struggled to keep up with the pace of climate-related claims, but there's no clear sailing for new insurance concepts.
Home shoppers have more information than ever to see how a potential new home will be threatened by wildfires, floods, heat and other climate risks. But research shows that large swaths of homebuyers and renters can't (or don't) act on that data.
Why it matters: Climate-risk data can empower decision-makers, but it can also exacerbate inequality.
Inflicting billions of dollars in losses is a great way to lose sympathy among politicians.
Time has run out: It's too latefor the crypto industry to get the kind of regulation it's been pushing for. The crypto winter arrived before any new laws could be written, and has changed the whole tone of the debate in Washington.
There's an air of unreality to the news these days — one perfectly in keeping with the "nobody knows anything" vibe that arrived with the onset of the pandemic in 2020 and never really left.
Why it matters: Recent days have seen a flurry of headlines that feel as though they've been run through an impossibility drive.
My job, as a newsletter writer, is to make sense of those headlines and to deliver you a story that explains them. But the honest truth is that there is no such story, and that things are very messy and weird right now — not always in a bad way.
Millennials are twice as rich as they were before the pandemic.
Why it matters: The recession arrived when millennials — anybody born between 1981 and 1996 — were feeling burned out and doomed. Student loans were stretching as far as the eye can see, and millennial wealth was just a fraction of what previous generations had managed to accumulate at the same age.
The $1.28 billion jackpot for Friday's Mega Millions drawing is now the second highest in the lottery game's 20-year history and the nation's third-largest lottery prize.
Why it matters: Americans have wagered hundreds of millions of dollars on lottery tickets just in the past two days, catapulting a U.S. lottery jackpot to more than $1 billion for only the fourth time ever, Axios' Felix Salmon writes.
