(Reuters) – An 81-year-old Rhode Island woman came forward on Tuesday to claim a $336.4 million PowerBall prize, the third biggest jackpot in the game’s history, lottery officials said.

Louise White kept her identity secret for weeks after buying the lucky ticket at a Stop Shop grocery store in Newport, Rhode Island. Her lucky picks won the jackpot by matching all five numbers plus the PowerBall number in a February 11 drawing.

White will take the prize home in one lump sum payment of$210 million, the highest cash jackpot ever, lottery officials said.

“I’m very happy and I’m very proud and this will make my family very happy. We are truly blessed,” White, a Newport resident, said during a brief appearance at a press conference.

This is the largest jackpot win in Rhode Island.

White purchased the ticket on a trip to the supermarket the night of the drawing when a family member wanted some rainbow sherbet dessert, according to a statement from the winner.

White kept the winning ticket in her Bible the night after the drawing and later in a safe deposit box.

Representatives helping White with financial planning offered few details about her family, life in Rhode Island or how she might spend the money. White claimed the prize through The Rainbow Sherbert Trust.

PowerBall is played in 42 states, Washington D.C. and the US Virgin Islands, according to the game’s website.

The state of Rhode Island stands to benefit from the big win, too.

Governor Lincoln Chafee, who helped present the check to White, said the state will get $14.7 million and the federal government will receive $52.5 million in taxes.

PowerBall began in April 1992 and the game was recently revamped to offer $2 tickets. The largest PowerBall jackpot was in 2006 for $365 million, according to lottery officials

The odds of winning the PowerBall jackpot are roughly 1 in 175 million.

(Reporting By Lauren Keiper; Editing by Greg McCune)

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Scott Hunt and his wood-powered truck (nationalgeographic.com)

The National Geographic Channel has launched a new program, “Doomsday Preppers” that places four to six families per episode in a theoretical, apocalyptic setting and chronicles how they respond under doomsday pressure.

As part of the show, Nat Geo enlisted Scott Hunt and his partner David Kobler, who run the Practical Preppers, a disaster preparedness business. Hunt evaluated how well the show’s contestants have prepared for their doomsday scenario and gives them advice on how to be better prepared to subsist on their own.

“Most people rely on [calling] 911,” Hunt said in an interview with Yahoo! News. “Most people don’t have a plan. If there’s social chaos, you won’t be able to count on someone providing goods and services.”

From zombie outbreaks to Mayan prophecies, Americans have a seemingly limitless interest in how and when civilization might end. What they appear to spend far less time on, is thinking and preparing for such an event.

“The biggest mistake people made on the show is going alone,” Hunt said. “You have to sleep. You’re making yourself vulnerable where one bad person could easily take you out.”

More than 800 people attended a recent prepping conference hosted by Hunt in Columbia, South Carolina.

So, where would be the safest place in the world to bunker down in an extinction level event? Would you want to be near an ocean or major river? Or, maybe in the mountains, far away from population centers? Hunt says there’s no one good answer to prevent against unforeseen disastrous events.

“People can’t move easily in a disaster and we’ve found most people don’t have the financial resources or desire to pick up and move before a disaster,” Hunt said.

Hunt has prepared a Top 10 list of essential items anyone should have in order to survive for at least a few days in case of disaster. But he says the most important survival element isn’t food or water.

“The most important asset is a community network,” Hunt said. “If you live in a major population center like Los Angeles, you’re going to want to tap into the community for knowledge and resources.”

“We’re trying to restore a back-to-community mentality,” Hunt said.

Beyond food, water and shelter, Hunt said the most desirable non-essential item in anyone’s survival shelter is electricity. Having access to a small manual generator or some form of solar power won’t run an entire house, “but can help power some lights, some critical piece of medical technology, or maybe even a washing machine,” Hunt said.

But what if the world doesn’t end? “Preparedness is a lifestyle,” he says. And he encourages people to possess the basic survival skills he says were commonplace only 50 or 60 years ago.

In his spare time, Hunt is pursuing one of his long-term projects. “I’m trying to get a truck to run on wood,” he said with a laugh.

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The $8,100 “George Washington” Chicken McNugget (eBay.com)

A Nebraska woman who put a 3-year-old Chicken McNugget up for auction on eBay has netted $8,100 for her local church.

Last month, the Sideshow told you about Rebekah Speight and the piece of fried fast food she says resembles George Washington. Speight said at the time she was selling the McNugget for help raise money for a youth camp run by her church, the Family Worship Center, in Sioux City, Iowa. The nugget sale was originally only expected to be a small contribution to the worship center’s ultimate fundraising goal of $15,000.

When we first reported the story, the McNugget was locked in relative obscurity, with a then-leading bid of just over $100. By the time the auction finished, its page had been viewed more than 40,000 times and received 71 bids on its way to $8,100.

The auction was temporarily pulled offline because it violated eBay’s rules against selling expired food products. However, the site quickly reinstated the auction, telling Speight in an email that eBay was “willing to make exceptions to help your cause.”

After Speight’s auction went viral, it became clear that people were just as excited, if not more, about helping the fundraising effort as acquiring the presidential piece of chicken. Speight herself appealed to potential bidders, writing on the auction site that, “by bidding on this rare ‘President George Washington Chicken McNugget’ … not only will you have an opportunity to be the new owner of this rare find, but you will be investing in the lives of children.”

The auction has even inspired some other sellers trying to cash in on the mini-phenomenon. One seller is offering a George Washington Chicken McNugget magnet for your consideration.

After first reporting on the auction, I received hundreds of emails from Sideshow readers who chimed in with their own thoughts on who they saw in the nugget’s visage.

Reader Kara wrote, “If you turn the nugget upside down, it looks more like an old man wearing a beret. You can even see his ear!”

Several other readers wrote in to say they saw a different iconic American figure, that of Uncle Sam. And a man named Andrew wrote in to observe, “The Chicken McNugget looks more like a profile of the Jigsaw mask from the ‘SAW’ movies.”

Other popular Yahoo! News stories:

• Scott Hunt wants to help you prepare for doomsday

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SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. (AP) — Authorities in California say a pair of 73-year-old twin sisters who were found dead in their home appear to have died of natural causes within a short time of each other.

El Dorado County Sheriff’s officials say they’ve ruled out foul play in the deaths of Patricia and Joan Miller, who were found Feb. 26 at their home in South Lake Tahoe.

Detectives trying to find their family say the sisters were entertainers in the Bay Area and appeared on a television show in the 1950s called “The Hoffman Hayride.” The twins also entertained troops at military bases.

Friends tell deputies that the sisters never married and were dependent on each other throughout their lives.

Authorities believe they may have family near Portland, Ore., where they were originally from.

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3:03pm UK, Tuesday March 06, 2012

A fisherman is waiting to hear if he has reeled in a new world record after catching a whopping tuna fish in New Zealand.

The Pacific bluefin weighed in at more than 335kg – and if approved by the International Game Fish Association it is the largest of its kind ever snapped up on a rod and reel.

It was pretty cool because when I first started fishing my dream was to catch a bluefin tuna exactly like that.

Nathan Adams

But what makes the catch even more of a feat is that Nathan Adams caught it from a six-metre tin boat.

“It was pretty cool because when I first started fishing my dream was to catch a bluefin tuna exactly like that,” said Mr Adams.

He said the fish was “pretty hard” to reel in because the line “was right on the point of the line breaking”.

Nathan Adams with his ‘record’ Pacific bluefin tuna

The 42-year-old angler and member of Muriwai Sports Fishing Club caught the monster fish near Houhora, off the east coast of the country’s North Island.

He is hoping his wife Lisa will allow him to hang up a cast that is being made of his jaw-dropping catch which was towed back to shore and shipped off to a chiller.

But she may take some convincing, having already said that “it will be like mounting a sofa” onto a wall in their lounge.

The Pacific bluefin was not the only prize-winning catch of the 2012 New Zealand Sport Fishing Council National competition.

Just days later, Mr Adam’s friend Alan Langdon reeled in a 358kg black marlin near Ahipara on the west coast.

Mark Nobilo, president of Muriwai Sports Fishing Club, said: “It’s pretty awesome, pretty special, especially for our little club.”

Last year, a giant bluefin tuna fetched a record $396,000 (£251,000) in auction at the world’s largest wholesale fish market in Tokyo, Japan.

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BERLIN (Reuters) – While some men splash out on flashy sports cars as they reach middle age, a number of men in one southern German community are turning from profession to confession — giving up careers, money and sex to become priests.

In the diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, a lawyer, doctor, manager, and teacher are among the latest group of men to swap white collar jobs for the clerical collar, beefing up the dwindling number of Catholic priests in Germany.

“I used to be an ordinary churchgoer, but suddenly my love for God snowballed into what became a powerful avalanche,” said Andreas Braun, 31. He quit his manager job to start training as a priest in Rottenburg, Braun told Bild newspaper on Tuesday.

Another career-switcher, 44-year-old Uwe Stier, said he grew tired of his job as a lawyer because he had to deal with divorces where families were falling apart in battles over money and children. He would rather work to keep families together.

“As a priest, I want to help people save their marriages,” Stier told the newspaper.

In giving up their former lifestyles for the Church, the 10 unmarried men mostly between the ages of 30 and 50 are bucking a trend in western popular culture which characterises middle age as a crisis period, prompting rash decisions and impulse buys.

The diocese in which the men were ordained as deacons last week, the first step on their way to becoming priests, said they were part of a growing trend.

“Before there were many who followed a more traditional route, studying theology before going into the church as young men but in the past few years this has shifted,” Thomas Broch, an official for Rottenburg-Stuttgart diocese, told Reuters.

“In this particular group there was an unusually high number of people who came who had been following a completely different career path,” he said.

“They bring a great amount of life experience to the role.”

The Catholic church in Germany, as in other countries, has been experiencing a shortage of priests, and German bishops estimate that two-thirds of all Catholic parishes in the country will not have their own priest by 2020.

Last year several prominent Roman Catholic politicians urged German bishops to lobby their countryman Pope Benedict for a change in Church policy to ordain married men in response to a worsening shortage of priests.

The German bishops have been merging parishes to have the dwindling clergy minister to ever larger areas.

German Catholicism was shaken by the sexual abuse scandals that swept through Europe last year. Some critics blame clerical abuse of minors on celibacy, a link the Church denies. In the wake of the scandals, polls found that about a quarter of German Catholics are considering leaving the Church.

(Reporting by Alice Baghdjian, editing by Paul Casciato)

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