Melissa Joan Hart makes history winning over a MILLION dollars on Celebrity Wheel of Fortune … and donates it all to charity
By Caitlyn Becker For Dailymail.com
Published: | Updated:
Melissa Joan Hart is the first million dollar winner in Celebrity Wheel of Fortune history.
The 45-year-old Sabrina the Teenage Witch actress took home a massive cash prize – $1,039,800 total – during Sunday night’s episode which will all be donated to charity.
Hart played against Mean Girls actress Lacey Chabert and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt star Titus Burgess in the Hollywood iteration of the beloved gameshow.
Incredible! Melissa Joan Hart is the first million dollar winner in Celebrity Wheel of Fortune history, taking home $1,039,800 for charity during Sunday night’s episode
‘What a fun way to win an incredible amount of money for charity! Congrats @youthvillages! And thanks @celebritywheeloffortune!! PS I just love the reactions in the second photo of @thereallacey and @instatituss,’ Melissa wrote on social media.
Adding: ‘But I’ll never forget the look on @officialvannawhite face when I won. What a thrill!’
The former child star played for a charity that she holds near and dear to her heart and frequently works with, Youth Villages.
Youth Villages is a non-profit that offers ‘help for children and young people across the United States who face a wide range of emotional, mental and behavioral problems. We work to find solutions using proven treatment models that strengthen the child’s family and support systems and dramatically improve their long-term success.’
Tough competition: Hart played against Mean Girls actress Lacey Chabert and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt star Titus Burgess in the Hollywood iteration of the beloved gameshow
Melissa, who filmed the episode some time ago, managed to keep her historic win a total secret from everyone, including Youth Villages.
”I didn’t leak it. I was like, ‘Guys, you’ll have to watch me on ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ It’s going to be epic,’ she told USA Today.
The charitable organization reacted to the big win on social media writing that they were ‘on cloud 9 right now.’
Melissa revealed to the outlet that after Lacey Chabert dominated in earlier rounds, she didn’t think she was going to take home the win.
‘What a fun way to win an incredible amount of money for charity! Congrats @youthvillages! And thanks @celebritywheeloffortune!! PS I just love the reactions in the second photo of @thereallacey and @instatituss,’ Melissa wrote on social media.
‘I would like to say witchcraft was involved,’ Hart joked in reference to her most famous television character. ‘But to be honest, I prayed a lot more than any kind of sorcery. I literally prayed every round, especially that winning round. I’d close my eyes and say, “God, give me focus and calm and let me just read these letters.”‘
Melissa’s reaction when she won was priceless but longtime hosts Pat Sajak and Vanna White seemed just as shocked.
‘Vanna White’s face turned white,’ Hart said. ‘Vanna looked at me and was like, ‘You got it! You got it!’ I hit the roof. She hit the roof.’
To win the historic million dollar prize, Melissa correctly guessed the answer to the final puzzle which was ‘bran muffins.’
‘I would like to say witchcraft was involved,’ Hart joked in reference to her most famous television character. ‘But to be honest, I prayed a lot more than any kind of sorcery. I literally prayed every round, especially that winning round. I’d close my eyes and say, “God, give me focus and calm and let me just read these letters.”‘
They just aren’t getting enough done. They aren’t moving quickly enough on President Biden’s major campaign promises.
The warning signs are all around.
Democrats are still wrangling over their infrastructure and social spending bills. And the longer the fight drags on, the uglier it looks. Washington watchers are right — to a degree — to say that this is simply the way that large legislation is worked through. It’s a slog.
In the end, I believe that the Democrats will have no choice but to pass something, no matter the size, because the consequence of failure is suicide. Democrats must go into the midterms with something that they can call a win, with something that at least inches closer to the transformations Biden has promised.
But the budget isn’t the only issue.
There is still a crisis at the border. In August, the Pew Research Center noted that the U.S. Border Patrol had reported “nearly 200,000 encounters with migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border in July, the highest monthly total in more than two decades.”
That’s the largest number since Bill Clinton was president.
The handling of Haitian immigrants was a particular blight on the administration, and the images of officers cracking their reins like whips will be hard to erase from memory.
Furthermore, the Senate parliamentarian has advised Democrats against including a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants in their spending bill. It is not clear if Senate Democrats will try to get around the parliamentarian’s nonbinding ruling, but 92 legal scholars have called on them to do just that.
As for police reform, negotiations on that legislation completely fell apart with customary finger-pointing as the epilogue…
…Then there is the massive, widespread assault on voting rights rolling out across the country, what some have rightly referred to as Jim Crow 2.0…
…Not to mention that Covid is still killing far too many Americans.
Democrats have been unable to deliver much to make their voters happy…
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has announced that it will cease offering trading pairs and payment options in Singapore dollars to remain compliant with the country’s regulators. The announcement followed a notice issued by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) stating that Binance “may be in breach of the Payment Services Act.”
Binance Complying With Singapore’s Regulations
Crypto exchange Binance announced Sunday changes to its services in Singapore. The company wrote that “to remain compliant with local regulators,” it will cease offering “SGD trading pairs” and “SGD payment options” on Friday, Sept. 10.
Binance will also remove its app from Singapore iOS and Google Play stores. SGD trading pairs will also be removed from Binance P2P Friday.
The exchange further advised users to complete all related P2P trades and remove all related advertisements by Sept. 9 “to avoid potential trading disputes.” Moreover, Binance clarified that it is not operating any official Telegram or online communication channels in Singapore.
“Our aim is to create a sustainable ecosystem around blockchain technology and digital assets,” Binance commented, elaborating:
Binance welcomes developments to our industry’s regulatory framework as they pose opportunities for the market players to have greater collaboration with the regulators.
The announcement to cease trading in Singapore dollars followed a notice by Singapore’s central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), which oversees the crypto industry in the country.
MAS said Thursday that it had “reviewed Binance.com’s operations and is of the view that Binance, the operator of Binance.com, may be in breach of the Payment Services Act.” The central bank added that “Binance is required to cease providing payment services … to Singapore residents and cease soliciting such business from Singapore residents.”
Last week, Binance said it hired Richard Teng, former CEO of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority at Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) as the new CEO for its operations in Singapore. Binance aims to become “a leader in regulatory compliance” as it pivots into a financial services company.
The global crypto exchange recently became the focus of many other regulators worldwide, including those in the U.K., Netherlands, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Germany, Hong Kong, Lithuania, and South Africa. They claimed Binance had been operating without authorization in their jurisdictions.
What do you think about Binance ceasing trading in Singapore dollars? Let us know in the comments section below.
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Now it’s new vehicles, restaurants, energy. Game of Whac-A-Mole as some price spikes slow while others begin. But it’s a lot worse than it seems.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) jumped 0.5% in July from June, after having jumped 0.9% in June, 0.6% in May, for a three-month annualized rate – the three-month momentum – of 8.1%. Year-over-year, CPI jumped 5.4%, same pace as in June, and the fastest since June 2008 (5.6%), all of which had been the fastest since January 1991, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today.
The CPI without the volatile food and energy components (“core CPI”) rose by 0.3% for the month and by 4.3% year-over-year.
The CPI measures the loss of the purchasing power – well, part of the loss of the purchasing power, as we’ll see in a moment – of the consumer dollar and thereby the purchasing power of labor. In July, this purchasing power dropped another 0.5% for the month, and for the past three months annualized, it dropped by 8.6% – “Honey, where did my big raise go?”
CPI vastly understates one-third of its components: housing cost.
Homeownership costs and rents account for 31% of CPI. These are the largest categories, the most important categories, but they hardly budged despite exploding housing costs and thereby suppressed the CPI.
“Rent of primary residence,” which weighs 7.6% in the overall CPI, ticked up just 1.9% year-over-year despite the chaos going on in the rental market, as many cities experienced double-digit rent increases, while others experienced declines. Every month this year, it nudged up 0.2% from the prior month as if nothing had happened. This is the CPI for rent, which has dropped from the 4% range in 2019 to 1.9%:
“Owners’ equivalent rent of residences” – the component that tracks the costs of homeownership and weighs 23.6% in the overall CPI – rose just 2.4% year-over-year despite the historic price explosion in the housing market.
The CPI’s homeownership component doesn’t track actual home-price inflation, but it is based on surveys that ask what homeowners think their home might rent for and is therefore a measure of rent as seen by the homeowner.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the national median price of existing homes spiked by 23.4% year-over-year, according to the National Association of Realtors.
The Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which tracks the price changes of the same house and is therefore a measure of house price inflation, spiked by 16.6% year-over year, the most in the data going back to 1987 (purple line). And yet, the measure for the costs of homeownership by the BLS barely budged (red line):
Energy costs spiked 23.8% year-over-year.
Energy accounts for 7.2% of the overall CPI. The spike was driven by gasoline, a surprise to no one who has filled up a tank of gas recently, which jumped 41.8% year-over-year. Natural gas jumped 19% year-over-year. The CPI for electricity service to the home rose 4.0% year-over-year.
Durable Goods inflation spiked 14.3% year-over-year, along with June the biggest since at least 1957.
The crazy new and used vehicle prices drove, so to speak, the spike in the CPI for durable goods. Other items in this category are appliances, consumer electronics, furniture, tools, bicycles, sports equipment, etc. The CPI for durable goods spiked by 14.3% year-over-year, after having spiked by 14.6% in June, both of which were the biggest jumps in the data going back to 1957.
The CPI for used vehicles jumped by 0.8% in July, but given the crazy spike that began last summer, July’s jump was a lot smaller than the jump in July last year. And on a year-over-year basis – due to this base effect – it spiked a tad less than in June, but by a still mind-bending 41.7%. Not much comfort yet for used vehicle shoppers, but price resistance has finally started to crop up and a portion of this crazy price spike is going to unwind:
New Vehicle CPI spikes the most since 1982, even as the used vehicle CPI’s spike is slowing. This is the game of inflation Whac-A-Mole, where one price spike here is replaced by another price spike there.
The CPI for new cars and trucks jumped by 1.5% in July, the third month in a row of these types of price spikes, the biggest since the cash-for-clunkers program during the Great Recession. This brought the year-over-year spike to 6.4%, the fastest since January 1982. But as we’ll see in a moment that price spike is understated by “hedonic quality adjustments.”
“Hedonic quality adjustments” suppress the CPIs for new & used vehicles. The BLS uses “hedonic quality adjustments” to account for improvements in vehicles over the years. For example, the estimated added costs of the decades-long transition from a four-speed automatic transmission to a 10-speed electronically controlled transmission are removed from the CPI at every step along the way. For an illustration what that means, here is my real-world F-150 and Camry price index compared to this CPI for new vehicles going back to 1989.
In theory, CPI measures price changes of the same item over time; and any improvements change the item, which then boils down to a price increase based on an improvement rather than just the loss of the purchasing power of the dollar. In theory, this makes sense.
In practice, these hedonic quality adjustments have been aggressively applied to push down the CPI, and thereby suppress the appearance of inflation. Under-reporting the loss of the purchasing power of the dollar is a convenient political thing, an effort to keep workers in the dark about the purchasing power of their labor.
The effect can be seen in the new vehicle CPI as an index, which shows that new vehicle prices fell in the years after hedonic quality adjustments took effect, and that in 2019, you could have bought a Camry or an F-150 for the same price as in 2000, which is of course a total farce. It’s only the recent spike that outran the hedonic quality adjustments, but it too will eventually be reeled in by them.
Restaurant prices are next in the inflation Whac-a-Mole.
Everyone who has been eating out or has followed the announcements by the fast-food chains knows that this has been happening, and it is now working itself ever so gradually into the CPI for “Food away from home,” which jumped by 0.8% in July from June, after having jumped 0.7% in June and 0.6% in May. Year-over-year, the index is up 4.6%, the most since 2009. But this is just the beginning.
Restaurants, struggling to hire workers, have increased their wages, and they also face increases in the costs of commodities, ingredients, and services they use, and they face higher operating costs due to the pandemic, and they’ve begun to pass those costs on to consumers:
This loss of purchasing power is “permanent.”
Only a period of deflation – with prices across the board actually dropping – would recuperate the purchasing power of the dollar. But that won’t be allowed. In my lifetime, there were only a few quarters of deflation. The rest of the time, it was either inflation or rampant inflation. And now, after a period of inflation, we’ve got rampant inflation. As the first chart above shows, the loss of purchasing power isn’t “transitory” or “temporary” but rock-solid permanent. What is transitory is the pace of the future losses of purchasing power.
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Actor Cuba Gooding Jr. could be on the hook for millions of dollars in damages after failing to respond to a lawsuit that accused him of raping a woman in New York City in 2013.
U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty issued a default judgment against Gooding on Thursday, saying it appeared the Oscar-winning “Jerry Maguire” star was willfully ignoring the lawsuit and that waiting for him any longer would be unfair to his accuser.
Judge Crotty said that under the law, the 53-year-old Gooding’s failure to respond and defend himself in the lawsuit constituted an admission of liability.
The judge gave Gooding a final deadline of Sept. 7 to participate in the case. After that, the judge said, he’ll decide on damages.
CUBA GOODING JR. ACCUSED OF 2013 RAPE IN CIVIL LAWSUIT
FILE – In this Aug. 13, 2020 file photo, Cuba Gooding Jr., front left, sits at the defense table with his lawyer Marc Heller, during a hearing in his sexual misconduct case in New York. (Steven Hirsch/New York Post via AP, Pool, File)
The plaintiff in the lawsuit, identified in court papers as Jane Doe, alleged Gooding raped her without protection after meeting her at a Greenwich Village VIP lounge and luring her to his hotel room under false pretenses.
She is seeking $6 million in damages.
No lawyer was listed for Gooding in the federal court docket. A message seeking comment was left with his lawyer in his New York City criminal case.
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Attorney Mark Heller, who represent Gooding in the criminal case, said the events alleged in the lawsuit “never took place” and suggested the plaintiff was somebody “looking for some glory to bask in the publicity and notoriety of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s case.”
Citing case law, Crotty said in his order Thursday that he will invite both sides to argue over damages in court before deciding what Gooding owes.
The accuser originally sued Gooding in August 2020. The case was dismissed and then quickly reopened in March over a technical issue. Gooding was served with court papers April 22 and failed to respond to an initial May 13 deadline, Crotty said in his order.
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In his criminal case, being tried in state court in New York, Gooding is accused of violating three different women at three different Manhattan night spots in 2018 and 2019. One of the women alleged Gooding pinched her buttocks. Another said he squeezed her breast.
Gooding has pleaded not guilty. An Oct. 18 hearing is scheduled to set a trial date.
A motion filed Wednesday by the US Justice Department said that since Nassar’s incarceration, he had received deposits into his inmate trust account that reached $12,825, including two stimulus checks totaling $2,000.
As of Wednesday, Nassar had $2,041.57 in his account, according to the motion. It is unclear where the additional money — more than $10,000 — went.
Nassar was sentenced on December 7, 2017, to 60 years in federal prison on child pornography charges.
In addition, he was sentenced on January 24, 2018, to up to 175 years in Michigan state prison after pleading guilty to seven counts of criminal sexual conduct. At the sentencing, 156 victims spoke, recounting similar stories of how they went to Nassar to receive treatment for sports injuries only to be sexually assaulted and told it was a form of treatment.
He is currently serving his federal sentence in the US Penitentiary in Sumterville, Florida.
Despite having money in his account, Nassar has only paid $300 toward the more than $62,000 he was ordered to pay, according to the motion. He was ordered to pay $57,488.52 in restitution to five victims in the child pornography case, along with an extra $5,000 for a special assessment fee pursuant to the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015, the motion read.
All of Nassar’s payments toward his restitution have been “in the form of the minimum $25.00 quarterly payments based on his participation” in the Inmate Financial Responsibility Program, the motion said.
“In other words, Nassar has paid approximately $8.33 toward his criminal monetary penalties per month,” the motion said.
The motion requests that the court order the Bureau of Prisons to turn over the funds in his account, up to $62,488.52, to be applied to his outstanding restitution and special assessment debt.
Included with the motion was a letter from the US Marshal Service on July 22 to the warden at US Penitentiary Colemen II in Sumterville, requesting that “all outbound financial transactions and withdrawals from his trust account be frozen pending further order of this Court,” the motion reads.
CNN has reached out to the Bureau of Prisons for comment.
Attorneys who represented many of Nassar’s victims were appalled by the news.
“The notion that anybody in the Justice Department would let this happen is just revolting,” said John Manly, a lawyer for many of Nassar’s victims, including Simone Biles. “The timing of this, with my client being unable to compete because of what happened to her, couldn’t be more upsetting. … They’re allowing the worst child predator in American history to spend thousands of dollars on himself and pay $8 a month to his victims. Something is completely broken and needs to be fixed.”
Alex E. Cunny, one of the attorneys who represents more than 150 of the girls and women who say Nassar sexually assaulted them, told CNN that it was another “shocking revelation” on the part of the Justice Department.
“The idea that Nassar is spending money on himself and not the women he has abused is unacceptable, especially, coming off the heels of the Inspector General’s report on how the FBI handled the initial investigation is another shocking revelation. How many ways will the Justice Department let the victims down?” Cunny said.
A July 14 report from the Justice Department found that FBI officials investigating the allegations of sexual abuse violated the agency’s policies by making false statements and failing to properly document complaints by the accusers, resulting in a delay in the probe into the claims.
The Office of the Inspector General found that senior officials in the FBI Indianapolis Field Office failed to respond to the Nassar allegations with the utmost seriousness and urgency that they deserved and required, made numerous and fundamental errors when they did respond and violated multiple FBI policies when undertaking their investigative activity.
The probe was opened in 2018 to see whether the FBI and its field offices dragged their feet to respond to allegations of sexual assault made by gymnasts and the USA Gymnastics organization in 2015 and 2016.
The FBI acknowledged the gross failures detailed in the report, saying in a statement, “This should not have happened. The FBI will never lose sight of the harm that Nassar’s abuse caused. The actions and inactions of certain FBI employees described in the report are inexcusable and a discredit to this organization.”
CNN’s Evan Perez, Devan Cole and Tierney Sneed contributed to this report.
Image: Heritage Auctions / Kotaku / Mark Wilson (Getty Images)
Super Mario 64 is a good game. But would you pay $1.5 million dollars for a copy of it? Probably not. But somebody just did.
Today, a highly rated and completely sealed copy of the Nintendo 64 classic Super Mario 64sold at auction for a jaw-dropping $1,560,000. This beats the previous record for a single video game auction, which was held by an ultra-rare copy of The Legend Zelda and was set just a few days ago. That rare game sold for an impressive sale price of $870,000 on July 9.
Auctioned off through popular auction house Heritage Auctions, this copy of Super Mario 64 was given a 9.8 rating on the Wata Scale. As a result of this high rating, Heritage Auctions says it just one of fewer than five known sealed copies in such incredible condition. The auction started on July 9 and ended today, on July 11. Even before the auction had started, this copy of Mario 64 was making headlines with its $100k starting price.
Read More:Now A Blastoise Pokémon Card Has Sold For $360,000
After selling for 1.5 million today, this new record for a single video game auction beats out the just set record of $870k. Before that, the record was held by an NES copy of Super Mario Bros that sold for $660k in April of this year. The new record of $1.5 million is more than double that old record set in April and is nearly double the more recent $870k record.
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All this money being spent on old video games makes me feel a bit sick. I can only imagine what even a fraction of all this cash could do to help so many people around the world. But folks like to hide their assets and wealth in strange ways, I get it. (I mean, I don’t get it. I’m not rich.)
It’s not just video games that are fetching enormous prices at online auction houses. Pokémon cards are becoming more and more expensive, with rare cards going for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like rare video games, these prices are also skyrocketing month after month. At this rate, it’s very likely that in the next few months I’ll be writing up a blog about a video game or Pokémon card selling for $5 million dollars.
I’ve never regretted trading away all my old video games and Pokémon cards more.
Central banks getting nervous about the Fed’s drunken Money Printing and the US Government’s gigantic debt? But still leery of the Chinese renminbi.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
The global share of US-dollar-denominated exchange reserves dropped to 59.0% in the fourth quarter, according to the IMF’s COFER data released today. This matched the 25-year low of 1995. These foreign exchange reserves are Treasury securities, US corporate bonds, US mortgage-backed securities, US Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities, etc. held by foreign central banks.
Since 2014, the dollar’s share has dropped by 7 full percentage points, from 66% to 59%, on average 1 percentage point per year. At this rate, the dollar’s share would fall below 50% over the next decade:
Not included in global foreign exchange reserves are the Fed’s own holdings of dollar-denominated assets, its $4.9 trillion in Treasury securities and $2.2 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, that it amassed as part of its QE.
The US dollar’s status as the dominant global reserve currency is a crucial enabler for the US government to keep ballooning its public debt, and for Corporate America’s relentless efforts to create the vast trade deficits by offshoring production to cheap countries, most prominently China and Mexico. They’re all counting on the willingness of other central banks to hold large amounts of dollar-denominated debt.
But it seems, central banks have been getting just a tad nervous and want to diversify their holdings – but ever so slowly, and not all of a sudden, given the magnitude of this thing, which, if mishandled, could blow over everyone’s house of cards.
20 years of decline.
Two decades ago, when the dollar had a share of about 70% of reserve currencies, a presumed competitor became day-to-day reality: The euro, which combined the currencies of the member states into one currency, thereby combining their weight as reserve currency. Since then, the dollar’s share has dropped by 11 percentage points.
By contrast, between 1977 and 1991, the dollars share had dropped by 46 percentage points – with huge plunges in 1979 and 1980 possibly linked to US inflation which was threatening to spiral out of control, peaking at nearly 15% in 1980. The plunge bottomed out in 1991, with inflation more or less under control. And the dollar’s share then surged by 25 percentage points until 2000:
The other reserve currencies.
The euro’s share had since been in the range between 19.5% and 20.6%, but it Q4 it broke out of the range and rose to 21.4%, the highest in the data. The ECB’s holdings of euro-denominated assets that it acquired as part of its QE are not included in the euro-denominated foreign exchange reserves.
The rest of the reserve currencies are also-rans – the spaghetti at the bottom in the chart below. This includes the Chinese renminbi, the bold red line at the bottom:
Renminbi a threat to the dollar’s hegemony? Not yet.
The renminbi’s share is still only 2.25%, despite the magnitude and global influence of China’s economy, and despite the hype when the IMF elevated the renminbi to an official global reserve currency in October 2016 by including it in the basket of currencies that back the Special Drawing Rights (SDRs).
But the renminbi’s share has been creeping up ever so slowly. At the rate it has been gaining momentum over the past two years (+0.36 percentage points in two years), it would take the renminbi another 50 years or so to reach a share of 25%.
Clearly, other central banks are still leery of the renminbi and its implications, and are not eager to dump their dollars all at once in exchange for renminbi; easy does it.
Also-rans under the microscope: Rise of the yen.
To see what’s going on with the spaghetti at the bottom of the above chart, I magnified the scale and limited it to the range of 0% to 6%. This takes the dollar and the euro out of the picture, and allows for a detailed look of the other reserve currencies.
What sticks out is the surge of the yen, the third largest reserve currency. This includes a 2.0-percentage point gain since Q4 2016, which blew away the 1.15-percentage point gain over the same period by the renminbi. With regards to the yen, the renminbi is losing ground.
Despite Brexit and all the scary hoopla around it, the pound sterling (GBP), the fourth largest reserve currency, has not given up any share.
The Eurozone has had a large trade surplus – between €200 billion and €275 billion a year in recent years – with the rest of the world after it emerged from the euro debt crisis in 2012. From the US side, the US trade deficit in goods with the Eurozone was $183 billion in 2020.
The Eurozone’s trade surplus shows that it is easily possible for an economic area with a large trade surplus to also have one of the top reserve currencies. There is no requirement that a large reserve currency must be associated with a large trade deficit. But having the dominant reserve currency helps the US in funding its trade deficits and ballooning government debts.
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