American democracy in action: Mississippi pols will literally “draw straws” today to settle a House race that ended in a tie earlier this month. The stakes are high—the lucky winner will determine whether the GOP gets a supermajority and thus the chance to more fully destroy the state’s already meager safety net.

A prize show horse expected to compete in the Grand Prix this year met a gristly end this weekend when “professional” thieves stole him from his stall and carved him up in a nearby field leaving behind just a “ribcage, neck and head” for his owners to find.

A broad issue that's arisen as an offshoot of the whole Jill Abramson-getting-fired discussion: Do successful people (in the media and elsewhere) get there mainly by luck, or by skill/ virtue/ drive/ other endearing quality? It is luck, of course. Never forget that it is mostly luck.

You're not going to win the lottery — especially not the Mega Millions — but if you do you probably shouldn't leave the winning ticket lying around for two weeks as you obliviously continue on with your life. Steve Tran of Northern California did just that for 13 days.

Even though the lottery is a cruel predator, nobody won the $425 million Mega Millions jackpot last night, raising the prize to $550 million for Tuesday's drawing.

An attempted robbery of a central Florida gas station nearly ended in tragedy early Monday morning, but a clerk's well-placed cell phone saved his life.

Getting lotto tickets in lieu of a tip is nothing like the movies — unless you take home the jackpot, that is.

Losing your keys while you're drunk is something that happens to most people, eventually. What doesn't usually happen is the next part of 20-year-old Tom Stilwell's story: surviving a fall from a neighbor's 15th floor balcony at 2 a.m. after attempting to jump to a balcony below.

It's like something out of a comic book: A Minnesota man was in the process of remodeling an abandoned Elbow Lake house he had purchased for $10,100, when he suddenly stumbled across the most valuable comic book of all time hidden inside the wall.

Virginia Maiden had an unusual Tuesday, to say the least. She awoke that morning to find that her 1995 Toyota 4-Runner had been stolen. “She was so confused, didn’t know what was going on, it was just gone,” a co-worker would later tell the press. So Maiden hitched a ride to McDonald's, where she worked the drive-thru window. At some point that day she spotted something in the drive-thru line that shocked her: a 1995 Toyota 4-Runner.

A California mother of four made a very fortunate mistake last month when she accidentally purchased a winning lottery ticket at her local CVS.

Joe Berti doesn't feel "unlucky" to have witnessed and survived both the bombing at the Boston Marathon and then the explosion at the fertilizer plant outside of Waco, Texas. He does want to "get away from all these explosions," however.

Well, if it wasn't his lucky belt buckle before, it certainly is now.

They say the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. But who says that's always a bad thing?

When Jennifer Maldonado opted out of her office's lottery pool, she figured it was no big deal.

Last spring, horses everywhere neighed a sigh of relief when production was cancelled on HBO's horse-racing drama Luck, after three gambling-addicted horses died on set.

Congratulations, person holding the ticket with 5-16-22-23-29, PB-6 on it! You just won the $550 million Powerball. That's right, you proved the naysayers wrong, and you're rich. But now what? As the haters will rush to remind you, winning the lottery is not always the best thing that could happen, but you'll prove them wrong. But first, how are you going to spend that half a billion and change? And if, for some reason, you didn't win tonight (impossible, I know), how will you spend your hard-earned fortune once your lucky numbers come up in a few months, which will definitely happen?

Tonight's Powerball jackpot — rolled over 16 times since October 6 — has reached $550 million, and officials think there's a 75 percent chance that the winning numbers will be drawn tonight.

The first Massachusetts resident in over a year to win the Mega Millions jackpot had another reason to smile: His girlfriend had just broken up with him.

His wife's breast cancer turned out to be a blessing in disguise for a Georgia man who discovered he had skin cancer after shaving his head in solidarity.