AWARDS

Tickets in North Carolina, Puerto Rico and Texas have matched all six numbers to split a $564.1 million Powerball jackpot, lottery officials said Thursday.

Sue Dooley, senior drawing manager and production coordinator for the Multi-State Lottery Association, said the Puerto Rico ticket was the first Powerball jackpot winner ever sold outside the continental United States.

Puerto Rico joined Powerball less than a year ago. Besides 44 states and Washington, D.C., the game is also played in the Virgin Islands, but there has never been a jackpot winner there, Dooley said.

The Texas Lottery posted on Twitter early Thursday that one of the winning tickets was sold at Appletree Food Mart in Princeton, Texas. There was no immediate information on the cities or stores that produced the winners in North Carolina or Puerto Rico.

It had been nearly a year since a Powerball prize reached the giant number people have come to expect recently. That was last February, when someone won $425.3 million.

Wednesday's jackpot was the third-largest in Powerball history and the fifth-largest U.S. lottery prize. The last time a Powerball jackpot climbed so high was May 2013 when a Florida ticket won a $590.5 million prize.

Should the winners select the lump sum option, each would get a one-third share of $381,138,450.16 before taxes. The other option is an annuity, under which the lottery would make payments 30 times over 29 years.

The largest payout in U.S. history was to three ticketholders in the Mega Millions game, the other national lottery drawing. That was a $656 million prize won in March 2012 by players in Kansas, Illinois and Maryland.

In 2012, state officials who run Powerball and Mega Millions changed ticket prices and lowered the odds of winning jackpots in hopes the moves would increase the number of huge prizes and draw more players. The new rules worked, causing jackpots to repeatedly climb to record levels. More than half of the top 10 US jackpots have been reached in the past couple of years.

The winning numbers in Wednesday's drawing were: 11, 13, 25, 39, 54 and the Powerball 19.

The jackpot now goes back to $40 million for the next drawing on Saturday.

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The company added to its trophy case Tuesday when its value surpassed $700 billion. That wasn't just a record for Apple, it was a new record for any U.S. company.

(Apple briefly touched this valuation in November, but Tuesday marked the first time it closed at that level, a far more significant achievement.)

Apple is in a league of its own. The next largest company, Exxon Mobil, (XOM) is worth $382 billion.

The stock rallied after Apple announced a partnership with First Solar (FSLR) on a nearly 3,000-acre solar energy farm that will funnel electricity to the tech giant's offices in California. That comes on the heels of Apple's best quarterly earnings ever in January and the ongoing expansion of Apple Pay.

Beyond that bright news, the company had a very successful bond sale last week, another indicator of just how excited investors remain about the company.

The stock closed at an all-time high of $122 a share Tuesday, and it's up 64% over the past year. Billionaire hedge fund manager Carl Icahn has predicted the stock could go to $200.

When Steve Jobs passed, there were concerns whether Tim Cook could lead the company. Those concerns seem quelled now.

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Tomorrow sees two big meetings in Europe, the success or failure of which could have major repercussions for markets, and the European political landscape.

In Minsk, Belarus, the leaders of Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia are due to meet to try to hammer out a peace agreement.

Failure to reach an agreement will lead to further EU economic sanctions against Russia, which were delayed at yesterday's EU foreign minister's meeting to allow time for the diplomatic offensive tomorrow.

Failure would also make it easier for The United States to step up its plans to send lethal aid to Ukraine - plans that US president Barack Obama has not yet committed to.

If the prospect of all-out war on its eastern border is not enough for Europe to worry about, there is also the real prospect of a major sovereign debt blow-up on its southern border.

Tomorrow evening the finance ministers of the euro area meet to see if a new deal can be done for Greece.

Greece is pushing for a 10 billion euro bridging loan to allow it avoid a funding crunch, while also giving the new Greek government time to come up with a new plan for the sustainability of Greek finances.

So far Greek plans have met with very little support from other euro area finance ministers, with German's Schaeuble saying that Greece must agree to a full plan, rather than a bridging loan, or commit to the existing bailout program.

There are hints this morning that there may be some room to compromise on both sides ahead of the meeting tomorrow, but with both the Greeks and the other euro area finance ministers still seeming so far apart on the details, chances of failure are still high.

The meeting of euro area finance minister starts at 17:30 CET, with the press conference due to start at 21:00 CET. There is no scheduled time for a Minsk press conference yet.

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Nerves over Greece's future in the euro and the conflict in Ukraine dragged on European markets on Tuesday, while bets on the likelihood of a US interest rate hike nudged the dollar higher and oil prices held steady after a rebound.

European stocks fell 0.3 percent and the euro slipped towards $1.13 ahead of what is set to be a tense, Greece-dominated meeting of euro zone finance ministers on Wednesday.

The global disinflation/deflation story was also back on investors' radar as Chinese inflation fell below 1 percent to its lowest in five months, drawing talk of further easing from China's central bank, the PBOC.

That had sent shares in Shanghai up more than 1 percent, though other Asian stocks eased on more generalized risk aversion.

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