A whole day of digging, and the winning ticket survived

Sanitation workers in southern Italy spent a full day digging through a truckload of garbage last week to recover a lottery ticket worth a million euros. The winner had thrown it out by mistake. When she scanned it at her local tobacconist without checking the numbers, the machine flagged it as "non-payable," which can mean the ticket lost or that the prize is too large for a small shop to pay out. She assumed the worse of the two. Then a family member noticed the winning numbers were the ones she always played, tied to a loved one, and called to ask. By then the trash had been collected. Roberto Nicola Toscano, an administrator at the waste company SANB, traced the truck to a safety-equipped station and put his staff to work. They found the ticket, in his words, "miraculously still in one piece." She offered to cover the taxpayer cost of the search herself.