A single winning ticket for a Mega Millions lottery jackpot of

at least $1.35 billion, the second largest jackpot in U.S. history, was sold in Maine, lottery organizers said on Saturday.

“Congratulations to the Maine State Lottery, which has just won its first-ever Mega Millions jackpot,” Ohio Lottery director Pat McDonald, lead director for the Mega Millions Consortium, said in a statement. “It’s the fourth billion-dollar jackpot in Mega Millions history.”

The statement did not identify the city or the holder of the winning ticket, which would have cost $2 to buy and matched all six numbers. They have the choice of a lump-sum payment of $724.6 million or an annual payout over 30 years.

Most winners go for the lump sum, which comes with a hefty tax bill, according to the Mega Millions website.

The winning numbers for the jackpot were 30, 43, 45, 46 and 61, plus the power ball 14. The jackpot had been rolling since it was last won on October 14, when a $502 million prize was shared by winning tickets in California and Florida. It is the second largest in the 20-year history of the game, topped only by the $1.537 billion won in South Carolina in October 2018.

In addition to the jackpot-winning ticket, fourteen tickets matched all five numbers to win the game’s second-tier prize of $1 million. Four were sold in New York, two in California, and one each in Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Half of the proceeds from the sale of each Mega Millions ticket remains in the state where the ticket was sold, where the money supports lottery beneficiaries, such as education or public employee pensions, and retailer commissions.

Pope Francis gave a funeral blessing to Cardinal George Pell on Saturday as revelations that he wrote an anonymous memo branding the current papacy a “catastrophe” hung in the air along with the incense.

About 300 people attended Pell’s funeral Mass in a secondary chapel of St. Peter’s Basilica. In keeping with tradition for deceased cardinals, the Mass was said by the dean of the College of Cardinals, Italian Giovanni Battista Re.

Francis arrived at the end to gave the final blessing in Latin over the dark brown wooden coffin on the floor. The coffin was incensed and sprinkled with holy water.

Re’s words were less a homily than a biography of Pell, 81, who died on Tuesday night in a Rome hospital of heart failure during hip replacement surgery.

Re mentioned that Pell had spent more than a year in jail before being acquitted of sexual abuse allegations in his native Australia in 2020.

“The last years of his life were marked by an unjust and painful condemnation,” Re said.

SNAP, an advocacy group for victims of clergy sexual abuse, in a statement had called on the Vatican to show “restraint” in funeral arrangements “unless the Church hierarchy wants to deepen already deep wounds”.

But Pell was given a standard solemn Vatican funeral for a cardinal. Re began the service by reading out the full text of a message the pope issued on Wednesday praising Pell for persevering in trying times.

The small talk after the funeral, particularly among diplomats and journalists, centred around the bombshell revelation.

Last year, respected Italian journalist Sandro Magister, who has a long track record of receiving leaked Vatican documents, published an anonymous memo circulating in the Vatican condemning Pope Francis’ papacy as a “catastrophe”.

The day after Pell died, Magister disclosed on his widely read blog Settimo Cielo (Seventh Heaven) that it was Pell who wrote the memo and gave him permission to publish it under the pseudonym “Demos” – Greek for populace. It included what the author said should be the qualities of the next pope.

“Commentators of every school, if for different reasons … agree that this pontificate is a disaster in many or most respects; a catastrophe,” the memo begins.

“The first tasks of the new pope will be to restore normality, restore doctrinal clarity in faith and morals, restore a proper respect for the law and ensure that the first criterion for the nomination of bishops is acceptance of the apostolic tradition,” it reads.

Father Joseph Hamilton, Pell’s personal secretary, declined to comment on Magister’s report and Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni said it had no comment.

Hamilton told Reuters after the funeral that Pell’s body will be flown to Australia early next week to be buried in the crypt at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, where he served as archbishop.

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Around 6,000 protesters – including climate activist Greta Thunberg – marched through mud and rain to the German village of Luetzerath on Saturday, according to a police estimate, demonstrating against the expansion of an opencast lignite mine.

The clearing of the village in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia was agreed between RWE (RWEG.DE) and the government in a deal that allowed the energy giant to demolish Lutzerath in exchange for its faster exit from coal and saving five villages originally slated for destruction.

“This is a betrayal of present and fuure generations… Germany is one of the biggest polluters in the world and needs to be held accountable,” Thunberg said on a podium, after she marched with a cardboard sign saying in German “Luetzi stays”, using a shortened name of the village.

As the protesters neared the village, they were confronted by police in riot gear, and some used batons to push the protesters back.

Regional police said on Twitter it had used force to stop people from breaking through barriers an nearing the danger zone at the edge of the excavation area.

Earlier this week, police cleared out protesters from buildings they have occupied for almost two years in attempt to stop the nearby mine’s expansion.

On Saturday, only few remained camping out in treehouses and an underground tunnel, but thousands turned up to protest against the mine, which activists say symbolises Berlin’s failing climate policy.

The president of North Rhine-Westphalia told German radio Deutschlandfunk on Saturday that energy politics was “not always pretty” but that the coal was needed more than ever in light of the energy crisis confronting Europe’s biggest economy.

Earlier Economy Minister Robert Habeck told Spiegel on Friday that Lutzerath was the “wrong symbol” to protest against.

“It is the last place where brown coal will be mined – not a symbol for more-of-the-same, but for the final frontier.”

But activists have said Germany should not be mining any more lignite and focus on expanding renewable energy instead.

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Secret Chinese police stations in New York

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When the war is over, Ukraine must assert its identity to the world. It’s time to consider what exactly our country needs to address and how.

Explosions have been reported in Kyiv, Vinnytsia and Dnipro.