Homeless Hungarian man hits lottery jackpot with his last few coins

László Andraschek plans to use his lottery winnings of £1.7m to set up foundation for addicts and abused women

The Guardian, Dan Nolan in Budapest, Sunday 16 February 2014

László Andraschek, a homeless Hungarian man became a lottery millionaire.
Photograph: H Baranyai Edina/BorsOnline

Unemployed, in debt and facing another year living on the streets in Hungary, László Andraschek spent his last remaining coins on a lottery ticket. Now the formerly homeless man has a choice of accommodation around the world after becoming one of Hungary's biggest lottery winners, with a prize of about £1.7m.

Andraschek, whose 630m Hungarian forint win last September went unnoticed until he made a significant donation to a hostel for the homeless this month, said buying the ticket was a chance decision at a railway station on his way to Budapest for a workshop for recovering alcoholics.

"I had only picked six numbers and the female shop assistant reminded me that I needed to pick a seventh," he said. "I told her to make it 24 – it doesn't matter, anyway."

But he was wrong and now plans to use his winnings to establish a foundation for addicts and women abused by their husbands.

The 55-year-old resident of Gyor, north-west Hungary, said his first act was to repay his debts, before cycling to a car dealer. "When the car salesman asked me how much I would be willing to spend, I held up three fingers. As I had arrived on a bike he assumed this meant 300,000 forints, but actually I meant 3m."

As neither he nor his wife can drive, the car will be driven only by his children.

Andraschek has since bought flats for each of his three children, paid off the debts of his relatives and is planning to travel to Italy, having not previously held a passport.

He and his wife, Anikó, said they will invest their money cautiously and avoid the ruinous spending splurges of many a lottery winner. "I have become rich but I have not become a different person. I could buy a large-screen TV because I can afford it, but I won't buy three because I can afford it."

Having struggled with alcoholism, Andraschek finally quit five years ago and says he "now has no need to return".

The news of Andraschek's dramatic upturn in fortunes came as human rights activists organised a wave of protests worldwide against a new Hungarian law that bans sleeping rough, in a country that has 30,000 homeless people. Last week alone, demonstrations were held in front of Hungarian embassies and consulates in London, Paris, New York, Vienna, Lisbon, Dublin, Brussels, Essen and Istanbul. Next weekend a Hungarian NGO run by homeless people, A Város Mindenkié (The City is for All), will stage another protest in Budapest against the law, which threatens those living on the streets with a fine or imprisonment.

Teenager buys £600 worth of shopping for 4p and donates food to charity

A savvy teenager collected hundreds of coupons to buy £600 worth of shopping for just 4p and then decided to donate the goods to a charity which helps needy families at Christmas

TheTelegraph, 18 Dec 2013

Jordon Cox on his 'Extreme Couponing' trip to Tesco in north London Photo: SWNS

A teenager collected hundreds of supermarket coupons to buy £600 worth of shopping for 4p so he could give the food to families.

Jordon Cox, 16, scoured endless websites and magazines and gathered hundreds of coupons for dozens of products.

After spending hours each day searching the internet for coupons, he managed to collect 470, which he took to his local supermarket, and filled three trolleys with food and household items.

The bill came to £572.16, but once the coupons were factored in the bill was reduced to just 4p - a saving of 99.81 per cent.

The teenager, of Brentwood in Essex, donated all his food to the charity Doorstep which gives food to disadvantaged families.

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He said: "I read an article that said a thousandth of the UK population are unable to eat this Christmas because they don't have any money.

"I decided wanted to help as many people as I can, and to also show that it's possible to shop very cheaply, if you know how.

"It's not an exact science, so you can never really work out ahead of time how much the total is going to be. I was stunned when it came up as just 4p."

He started his Christmas shopping project on December 1 and scoured hundreds of in-store magazines and websites for money off and cash back coupons.

His shop, at Tesco Brent Cross, ended with an hour stop at the checkout to unload his items which included 200 packets of biscuits and 60 packs of butter.

He said: "The lady at the checkout had worked at Tesco for 19 years, and she said she'd never seen anything like it before. I had a big crowd. I felt like a celebrity.

"My heart was pounding and the adrenaline was pumping when we got to the till. So much could have gone wrong.

"I could have left some coupons at home, or not read the terms and conditions properly. Some of them might have expired too."

He began his obsession with coupons last year after his parents split up and his mother Debbie Cox, 52, struggled to cope on her NHS admin assistant salary.

The teenager, who is studying a B-tec in business and enterprise, has complete control over his mum's weekly shop, and plans all their meals in advance.He estimates to have saved more than £2,000 this year alone and has a huge stockpile of hundreds of items at home.

He added: "Supermarkets rarely give out coupons for their own-brand items, so it can be quite difficult to get meat and vegetables for a discount.

"But sometimes you can, and the huge amount of money we save on toiletries, snacks and dry goods means mum can splash out on meat - as long as it's on an offer.

"It's taken a bit of learning, but now I've managed to get our weekly shop down from £60 to £10 on a bad week.

"Sometimes we've even managed to get it for free. We do have to plan our lives around what's on offer though.

"The Christmas shop was definitely the best experience of my life. I feel so pleased that I could help so many people."

Ms Cox said: "It's pretty amazing really, I'm so proud of my boy. The families he helped were all so grateful and happy.

"He's a real whizz when it comes to saving, and I'm glad he turned his talents to helping as many people as possible."

Vicky Fox, who works at Doorstep, said families who he had helped out were overwhelmed by the donation. She said: "I'd call his gift a great and generous act of a young man and what he did made a real difference.

"He's made a really difference to families who work with us to survive on extremely low incomes and do need the help.

"He made such a different to people living on the breadline."

Jordon's coupon collecting attracted the attention of American couponers, who invited him to a saving conference in Orlando, Florida. But he even managed to make a saving and he negotiated a week-long stay in a five-star hotel for a tenth of the listed price.

He said: "Not many people my age are concerned with their parents' money.

"But after seeing the smile it put on my mum's face the first time I saved on the shopping, I thought it was something too good to give up.

"It's my hobby and I love it. I only spend about 30 minutes every day looking for vouchers and coupons, but it pays dividends.

"I still get pocket money, which I'm saving up for something special."

The teenager is planning on launching his own coupon-hunting website CouponShop.co.uk next year to help other save big on their shopping.

He bought:

* 20 packs of frozen Yorkshire puddings

* 20 jam roly polys

* 80 packs of butter

* 23 packs of Quorn mince

* Four Gressingham poussin.

* 40 black puddings

* 200 packets of biscuits

* 23 blocks of hard cheese

* 20 pots of Yeo Valley organic yoghurt

* 19 bottles of fruit juice.

* 10 boxes of Paxo stuffing

* 40 bottles of Anchor whipped cream

* 15 bags of frozen Brussels sprouts

* 4 packs of After Eight mints

* 15 Covent Garden Soups.

* 10 bags of Florette Salad

* 36 packs of Cauldron tofu, vegetarian sausages and falafel

* Crumble mix

* Haribo sweets.

Canadian says will give away lottery jackpot

Google – AFP, 18 December 2013

A Canadian retiree pledged Tuesday to give away a Can$40-million ($37 million

USD) lottery prize to charity, telling Canada's public broadcaster that he doesn't

need the money (AFP/File, Nicholas Kamm)

Montreal — A Canadian retiree pledged Tuesday to give away a Can$40-million ($37 million USD) lottery prize to charity, telling Canada's public broadcaster that he doesn't need the money.

"I've been fortunate enough, through my career, 44 years with a company. I did very well for myself. I've done enough that I can look after myself, for my kids, so they can get looked after into the future. I don't really need that money," Tom Crist told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The Calgary, Alberta resident retired as chief executive of an electrical wholesale company in September, four months after learning from lotteries officials that he had won the jackpot.

Crist had been golfing in California when he got the call.

He waited until now to claim the jackpot because at the time, he told the CBC, "I just didn't know how to deal with it."

"As soon as I hung up from my cellphone call from Western Canada Lottery I never thought about it. We finished our lunch, we went out golfing. I've kept it a secret, even my kids didn't know until today," he said.

The funds, he said, will be rolled into a trust fund and doled out to charities chosen by himself and his children over the coming years, in memory of his wife who died of cancer two years ago.

US bishop dresses up as homeless man to expose congregation's lack of compassion

An American bishop has taken on the prejudices of his church congregation by dressing up as a homeless man

The Telegraph, Jon Swaine, New York, 29 Nov 2013

David Musselman disguised himself as a homeless man Photo: FACEBOOK

An American bishop who disguised himself as a homeless man to give a sermon about compassion was asked to leave his church by unknowing congregants.

David Musselman, a Mormon cleric near Salt Lake City, Utah, said he wanted to teach members of his church to be kind to all people. “To be Christ-like, just acknowledge them,” he said.

Mr Musselman recruited a professional makeup artist to transform his face and wore a wooly hat, thick spectacles, a false beard and a fake scar. Even his own family did not recognise him.

“The main thing I was trying to get across was we don't need to be so quick to judge,” Mr Musselman told his local television news station.

“Many actually went out of their way to purposefully ignore me, and they wouldn't even make eye contact,” he said. “I'd approach them and say, 'Happy Thanksgiving'.”

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After being asked to leave by five people, Mr Musselman walked to the pulpit during a service and disclosed his true identity by taking off his wig, fake beard and glasses.

“It had a shock value that I did not anticipate,” he said. “I really did not have any idea that the members of my ward would gasp as big as they did.”

Jaimi Larsen, one of the congregants, said she was surprised. “I started feeling ashamed because I didn't say hello to this man,” said Ms Larsen. “He was dirty. He was crippled. He was old. He was mumbling to himself”.

Mr Musselman said he was touched by the reaction of younger members of the church. “I was impressed by the children,” he said. “I could see in their eyes they wanted to do more”.

Tara Starling, the makeup artist who transformed Mr Musselman's appearance, said it was the most rewarding job she had done.

“I used to dream that the pinnacle of my career would be to work on a film and the film would get nominated for an Academy Award of makeup,” she told The Deseret News.

“But I would have to say that somebody writing a Facebook comment saying, ‘Thank you for sharing this. It’s changed my mind. It’s changed my heart, and it’s changed the way that I’m living,’ that’s worth more than all of the Academy Awards in the world to me.”

Mr Musselman, whose stunt came just before the Thanksgiving holiday, said that he did not intend to embarrass the members of his church or make them feel ashamed.

Instead, he said, he wanted them to remember to be kind all year long to people from all walks of life.

Old-age poverty soars in Germany

Deutsche Welle, 22 October 2013

Gaps in Germany's statutory pension system have forced nearly a half-a-million retirees to turn to local welfare offices for subsistence funding. Unions and charities are demanding that the government intervene.

Germany's federal statistics bureau said on Tuesday that 465,000 retirees older than 65 were registered in 2012 as dependent on basic welfare subsidies. That was a 6.6 percent increase on the previous year and almost twice the count in 2003.

The DGB trade union federation said the true level of impoverished elderly in Germany was twice as high as the registered level given in the official statistics.

DGB presidium member Annelie Buntenbach said it was commonly known that many elderly persons among Germany's 20 million retirees felt ashamed and did not submit formal applications for basic assistance to their local authorities.

The chairman of the AWO workers' charity, Wolfgang Stadler, said without reform of Germany's pension system, which is funded by monthly transfers from employers and employees, Germany would end up with millions dependent on basic welfare assistance.

Metropolitan poverty

The statistics bureau based in Wiesbaden said German retirees classed as impoverished lived mainly in larger cities.

On average across Germany, 3 percent of all retirees drew basic welfare allowances. In Hamburg the level was 6.2 percent; in Berlin 5.3 percent, it said.

Last week, the tabloid "Bild" featured a DGB survey that indicated that 42 percent of employees in Germany assumed that on retirement their statutory pensions would be insufficient to make ends meet.

More than two-thirds said they had little or no entitlements to supplementary pensions that some employees accumulate during their working lives.

ipj/hc (epd, Reuters, AFP)

Pope condemns idolatry of cash in capitalism

Head of Catholic church condemns economic system and calls for society with people, not money, at its heart

The Guardian, Lizzy Davies in Rome, Sunday 22 September 2013

Pope Francis: 'Where there is no work, there is no dignity.' Photograph:
Ciro Fusco/EPA

Pope Francis has called for a global economic system that puts people and not "an idol called money" at its heart, drawing on the hardship of his immigrant family as he sympathised with unemployed workers in a part of Italy that has suffered greatly from the recession.

Addressing about 20,000 people in the Sardinian capital of Cagliari, the Argentinian pontiff said that his parents had "lost everything" after they emigrated from Italy and that he understood the suffering that came from joblessness.

"Where there is no work, there is no dignity," he said, in ad-libbed remarks after listening to three locals, including an unemployed worker who spoke of how joblessness "weakens the spirit". But the problem went far beyond the Italian island, said Francis, who has called for wholesale reform of the financial system.

"This is not just a problem of Sardinia; it is not just a problem of Italy or of some countries in Europe," he said. "It is the consequence of a global choice, an economic system which leads to this tragedy; an economic system which has at its centre an idol called money."

The 76-year-old said that God had wanted men and women to be at the heart of the world. "But now, in this ethics-less system, there is an idol at the centre and the world has become the idolater of this 'money-god'," he added.

Sardinia, one of Italy's autonomous regions with a population of 1.6 million, has suffered particularly badly during the economic crisis, with an unemployment rate of 20%, eight points higher than the national average, and youth unemployment of 51%.

Last summer the island's hardship became national news when Stefano Meletti, a 49-year-old miner, slashed his wrists on television during a protest aimed at keeping the Carbosulcis coal mine open.

Urging people not to give up hope even in the harsh economic climate, Francis also called on them to fight back against the "throwaway culture" he said was a by-product of a global economic system that cared only about profit. It was, he said, a culture that saw the most vulnerable society become marginalised.

"Grandparents are thrown away and young people are thrown away," he said. "And we must say no to this throwaway culture. We must say: 'We want a fair system; a system that allows everyone to move forward.' We must say: 'We do not want this globalised economic system that does so much harm.' At the centre has to be man and woman, as God wants – not money."

His own father, he recalled, had suffered great hardship after moving from northern Italy to Argentina in the 1920s. He went "a young man … full of illusions" of making it in the new world, but soon found there was no work to be had. "I didn't see it; I had not yet been born. But I heard of this hardship at home … I know it well," said Francis.

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"The Time Capsule of Gaia" – Feb 9, 2013 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Caroll) - (Text version)

“…  Tesla the Man

There was a point in time when humanity almost stumbled, by the way. You were having a hard time with electricity. So a man came along who was way ahead of his time and was available and his name was Nikola Tesla. He gave you a principle that today you call alternating current. Dear ones, I challenge you to understand this principle. Most of you can't, because it is not in 3D. The attributes are still considered "genius-level thinking" to this day. The whole idea of the kind of electricity you use today comes from this man's quantum mind.

That was all he was allowed to do. Tesla himself was a kind of time capsule, delivered at the right time. He had more, but alternating current was all that was allowed to be given to the planet at that time. Oh, he tried to give you more. He knew there were other things, but nothing was able to be developed. If I told you what else he had discovered, you might not be aware of it at all, since it was never allowed to get out of the box. Earth was not ready for it.

Tesla discovered massless objects. He could alter the mass of atomic structure using designer magnetics, but he never could control it. He had objects fly off his workbench and hit the ceiling, but he couldn't duplicate or control it. It just wasn't time yet. Do you know what else he was known for? It was seemingly the failure of the transmission of electricity. However, he didn't fail at all.

There are pictures of his tower, but every time a Human Being sees a tower, there is a biased assumption that something is going to be broadcast through the air. But in the case of Tesla, he had figured out how to broadcast electricity through the ground. You need towers for that because they have to pick up the magnetics within the ground in a certain way to broadcast them and then collect them again from the nodes of the planet's magnetic grid system. We talked about this before. He was utilizing the grid of the planet that is in the earth itself! He was on the edge of showing that you could use the whole grid of the planet magnetically to broadcast electricity and pick it up where you need it, safely, with no wires. But the earth was not ready for it.

Tesla died a broken man, filled with ideas that would have brought peace to planet Earth, but he was simply not allowed to give any of them to you.

Now I'll tell you why he was stopped, dear ones, and it's the first time we have ever told you – because these inventions were too easy to weaponize. Humanity just isn't ready for it. You're not ready for massless objects, either, for the principles are too easy to weaponize.

"So," you might say, "when will we be ready for it?" I think you already know the answer, don't you? At the time when Human consciousness reaches a point where that which is most important is unification and not separation, it will happen. A point where conquering and power are not desirable ideas or assets. A point where humanity will measure the strength of its population by how healthy they are and not by economic growth. A point where coming together with your neighbor is the main objective to social consciousness, and not conquering them or eliminating them. That's coming, dear ones. It's a ways away, but it's coming. Look around the planet at the moment. The old energy leaders are obvious, are they not? It's like they are relics in a world of thinking that is passing them by.  ….”

Gates, Buffett urge Indian tycoons to help poor

The Jakarta Post, Katy Daigle, Associated Press, New Delhi | Thu, 03/24/2011

Billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates and Warren Buffett urged India's tycoons on Thursday to give up some of their newfound wealth to help the country's hundreds of millions of impoverished people.

It is similar to their mission in China in September, where they had little success in sparking a charitable movement among that country's growing number of first-generation tycoons.

A closed-door meeting Thursday between the Americans and the billionaires of India may yield more results. Corporate foundations have multiplied as India's economy has barreled ahead with nearly 9 percent growth in recent years, making it the second-fastest-growing major economy after China.

Forbes has counted 65 billionaires in India this year, and there were at least 126,700 Indians with at least $1 million in 2009, according to a study by Merrill Lynch and the Capgemini consulting firm.

But charitable giving in India has lagged behind, and Gates and Buffett have set out to spread the philanthropic tradition more entrenched in Europe and the United States, where tax structures encourage giving.

Gates suggested earlier Thursday that giving and earning were not so different.

"Giving and making money have a lot of similarities," he told reporters in New Delhi. At Microsoft Corp., "we were hiring really talented engineers. Now, it's immunologists and scientists."

Already, the Microsoft co-founder and the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway investment fund seem to be inspiring followers among India's rich - long criticized for shirking any responsibilities toward the country's struggling masses.

After meeting Buffett this week, Chairman G.M. Rao of GMR infrastructure group pledged $340 million toward education and vocational training, according to the Indian Express. And last year, India's third-richest man, Azim Premji, shifted shares worth about $1.95 billion in his software services giant Wipro Ltd. toward funding education for the poor. It was the country's largest lump-sum donation in modern times.

India's second-richest man, Mukesh Ambani - known better for building a 27-story home than for his social vision - started a foundation in 2009, and his Reliance Industries pledged to double the foundation's initial $110 million endowment.

It may be just the beginning of homegrown philanthropy for India, where there are countless aid and civil society organizations funded mostly by foreign organizations and the government.

Analysts have suggested the lag between corporate earning and giving may come down to the simple fact that India's wealth is still young. The economic boom began from reforms in the early 1990s, while philanthropy in most countries takes decades to mature.

Gates and Buffett have been traveling in India this week on other agendas, with Gates and his wife Melinda visiting villages undergoing disease vaccination campaigns, while Buffett planted trees and held court with business leaders in Bangalore.

The global Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the biggest health care philanthropies in India.

Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway company has an insurance distribution unit based in Bangalore.

Web game provides rice for hungry

BBC News

An internet word game has generated enough rice to feed 50,000 people for one day, the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) has said.

The game, FreeRice, tests the vocabulary of participants. For each click on a correct answer, the website donates money to buy 10 grains of rice.

Companies advertising on the website provide the money to the WFP to buy and distribute the rice.

FreeRice went online in early October and has now raised 1bn grains of rice.

That is enough rice to feed 50,000 people for one day, the WFP said on Friday.

'Viral marketing'

The head of the WFP, Josette Sheeran, said: "FreeRice really hits home how the web can be harnessed to raise awareness and funds for he world's number one emergency."

She said word of the game has spread with the help of internet bloggers and websites like Facebook and YouTube.

"FreeRice really hits home how the Web can be harnessed to raise awareness and funds for the world's number one emergency," she said.

"The site is a viral marketing success story."

FreeRice is the invention of US online fundraising pioneer John Breen.

Gap pulls 'child labour' clothing

BBC News

Fashion chain Gap has withdrawn from sale children's clothing allegedly made using forced child labour in India.

A 10-year-old boy was filmed making clothes for Gap shops in the US and Europe as part of an investigation by the UK's Observer newspaper.

The boy told the Observer he had been sold to a factory owner by his family.

Gap, which has made commitments not to use child labour, said that only one item - a girl's smock blouse - was involved.

The boy said he had been working for four months without pay and would not be allowed to leave the job until the fee his family had received was repaid.

Another boy of 12 said children were beaten if bosses thought they were not working hard enough, the paper reported.

Dan Henkle, a spokesman for Gap, said: "We were made aware earlier this week that a reporter had found an incident of children working in a factory that was producing for one of our brands, and this is completely unacceptable to us.

"We have a strict prohibition on child labour, and we are taking this very seriously. This is very upsetting and we intend to investigate thoroughly."

Emergency meeting

The spokesman said Gap monitors factories which make its clothing and in 2006 revoked approval for 23 factories which it said failed to comply with its standards.

Mr Henkle also said the company was calling an emergency meeting with its suppliers in the region.

The smock blouse will not be offered for sale in the company's 3,000 stores around the world, Gap said, and instead will be destroyed.

Western clothing chains increasingly get their products made in Asia, taking advantage of cheaper labour.

Births to Unwed Mothers Increase to Record Proportion in U.S.

By Elizabeth Lopatto

July 13 (Bloomberg) -- More than a third of all U.S. births in 2005 were to unwed women, the highest level ever reported, according to data released today by the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics.

The increase to 37 percent may be due to more unmarried couples living together, people getting married later in life, restricted access to birth control and concern among older women that fertility declines with age, experts said. Pregnancy among teenagers fell as fewer had sex and more used contraceptives, the report's authors said.

Unwed mothers are more likely to have children with lower birth weights and a higher infant mortality rate, and their offspring are at higher risk of living in poverty, according to the report. Even after controlling for the mother's age, the children are at greater risk, said report co-author Stephanie Ventura, the chief of reproductive statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland.

``In many cases, there's a socio-economic situation that's not as favorable,'' Ventura said in a telephone interview on July 11. ``Many of these women don't have the same nutritional opportunities, even before they're pregnant.''

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