South Carolina man who won nearly $400 million jackpot withholds name

By Harriet McLeod

CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters) - The winner of a nearly $400 million Powerball jackpot has declined to be named, lottery officials said on Monday, but they said the winner who lives near Columbia, South Carolina, told them he bought the ticket while on a mission to buy hot dog buns.

The man stopped at a gasoline station in central South Carolina after his wife asked him to pick up the hot dog buns, but after finding they had none, he bought $20 of Powerball tickets instead, the officials said.

His big win late on Wednesday - the fourth-largest prize in the lottery's history - occurred on just the second time he had purchased tickets, the man told lottery officials.

"This is a life changing event - there are a lot of zeros in this money," Paula Harper Bethea, executive director of the South Carolina Education Lottery, had said last week while the winner remained unknown.

When he came forward on Monday afternoon, the man, who asked not be identified, told lottery officials that he was home alone when he discovered on Thursday that he won. He spun around repeatedly in his kitchen and told only his little dog about his good fortune, lottery officials said.

The man can claim his full prize of $399.4 million paid over 29 years or opt for a more immediate cash payout of $233 million, officials said.

For the state of South Carolina, the jackpot win means an additional $15 million in tax revenue, officials said. The lottery benefits education in the state, they said.

Murphy USA gasoline station in Lexington, South Carolina, where the man bought the machine-generated winning ticket on Wednesday afternoon will be rewarded $50,000 for its role, lottery officials said.

Powerball prizes have been getting larger, in part because the ticket price rose to $2 from $1 in January, and because California, the most populous U.S. state, joined in April.

Powerball is played in 43 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Chances of winning the big prize are 1 in 175 million, the lottery said.

The largest Powerball jackpot was $590.5 million, won by a Florida woman in May. Ticket holders in New Jersey and Minnesota shared a $448 million jackpot in August.

The amounts paid to the winners were substantially smaller because they chose cash over an annuity.

(The story refiles to restore dropped word to headline)

(Editing by Scott Malone, Barbara Goldberg and Ken Wills)

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Atomic bomb nearly exploded over North Carolina in 1961, report says

FILE Aug. 6, 1945: Photo released by the U.S. Army, a mushroom cloud billows about one hour after an atomic bomb was detonated above Hiroshima, western Japan.AP

The U.S. Air Force nearly detonated an atomic bomb over North Carolina in 1961 that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that destroyed Hiroshima, according to a declassified report published Friday in The Guardian.

The 1969 document, obtained by investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, details the Jan. 23, 1961, B-52 crash near Goldsboro, North Carolina, that saw two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs break up in mid-air.

The report said that one of the two bombs behaved exactly as nuclear weapon is designed to function in wartime and that only a single low-voltage switch prevented detonation. Fallout could have been deposited over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City, according to the report.

Parker Jones, a senior engineer in the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., wrote in the report that "one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe".

Jones, analyzing a book by physicist Ralph Lapp on the crash, found that the bombs "did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52" and concluded that the detonation "would have been bad news – in spades."

Three of the eight crew members died in the crash. In July 2012, the state of North Carolina placed a historic marker in the town of Eureka with the words "nuclear mishap," according to the Raleigh News and Observer.

The Guardian reported that Schlosser obtained the document while conducting research for a new book on the nuclear arms race, "Command and Control."

"The US government has consistently tried to withhold information from the American people in order to prevent questions being asked about our nuclear weapons policy," Schlosser told the newspaper. "We were told there was no possibility of these weapons accidentally detonating, yet here's one that very nearly did."

Click here for more from The Guardian.

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