OTTAWA It took more than 22 months, but a winner has finally been crowned from the Kin Club of Russell s Catch the Ace lottery. The lottery began Sept. 8, 2019 and lasted for 679 days, with a couple of pauses due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Sunday, 31-year-old Shawn Stephenson of Brockville took home the grand prize. When I got the phone-call, I was shaking so bad. The excitement, my nerves got to me, said Stephenson on Tuesday. His name was pulled from more than 50,000 tickets for the weekly prize of $51,529. He thought the ace of spades was hiding in envelope number 4. I picked envelope 4, thinking maybe envelope 4 was the lucky number, Stephenson said.
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It’s a humid autumn morning and I can’t take my eyes off the beads of sweat rolling down Michael Yabsley’s brow. Sitting in his eclectic apartment in Sydney’s Darlinghurst, the former Liberal firebrand and antiques collector pours me a steaming cup of English Breakfast. He offers a melting moment to go with the tea, which is served in an elegant white porcelain cup and saucer. “Store-bought,” he says sheepishly, referring to the biscuit. Not that I would expect the man once described as the NSW Liberals’ much-feared “pet assassin” to have whipped up a batch of bikkies. We share an awkward chuckle.
OTTAWA For more than a year and a half, the ace of spades has remained hidden in the Kin Club of Russell’s Catch the Ace fundraiser lottery. The fundraiser for six local charities began before the start of the pandemic and had to be put on pause three times due to stay-at-home orders and lockdowns. It is now back up and running and the growing jackpot sits at $400,000 dollars. “It is all anyone is talking about Catch the Ace! This lottery has taken the entire township and the entire province by storm,” says Doug Anthony with the Kin Club of Russell.
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The executions behind Andrew Peacockâs Cambodia crusade
The late politicianâs principled stand against murderous dictator Pol Pot in the late 1970s would forever change the way Australia deals with foreign regimes.
Two Australians were captured in 1978 and tortured to death by the Khmer Rouge at the Tuol Sleng security prison, which is now a genocide museum.Â
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It was an unlikely setting for a bust-up between an Australian prime minister and his foreign minister. En route to New Delhi for a meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government in September 1980, Andrew Peacock presented Malcolm Fraser with compelling evidence that two young Australians, David Scott and Ron Dean, had been tortured to death by the Khmer Rouge in what was then known as Kampuchea.