Morning Roundup: The People Who Have All the Luck Edition

Good morning, D.C. It looks like someone bought a winning Powerball ticket at the Giant on Alabama Avenue in Southeast that's worth $144 million. Here at DCist, we'd like to volunteer our collective financial management expertise to this lucky District resident. We think the best possible thing this person could spend their money on in this ailing economy is to pay off the credit cards of each and every member of the DCist community. Once we're all freed from debt, we'll be much happier, more productive, more financially secure citizens -- in other words, everybody wins! So, mystery lottery winner, all you have to do is email tips(at)dcist.com and we'll arrange the whole thing. Easy peasy.

Number of Homeless Families Up 15 Percent: If ever there was a sign of how hard the recession is hitting the D.C. area, a new count of the region's homeless population conducted by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments shows that the number of homeless families has skyrocketed, up 15 percent since the previous year. The Post reports on the finding, noting that the overall homeless population only went up 2.2 percent. Single people living on the edge seem to be faring much better than families with children.

Peaceaholics Leader Says He's Being Unfairly Scrutinized: Bill Myers picks up the ongoing Examiner-led reporting on the firetruck/Dominican Republic/Peaceaholics/Mayor's Office maybe-scandal. Peaceaholics leader Ron Moten tells the newspaper he and his organization are being treated unfairly for what was simply supposed to be a good deed: “If we would have thought that trying to help ... would have brought about all this chaos, we wouldn’t have done it,” he said.

Briefly Noted: Virginia General Assembly rejects $125 million in federal stimulus dollars ... Terry McAuliffe has tons and tons of money for his Virginia Gov. race ... Mary Cheh talks about her breast cancer fight with WUSA9 ... Night work to narrow Beltway to one lane.

This Day in DCist: In 2008, we were getting excited about all the bike sharing programs coming our way, and in 2005, former editor Mike Grass mused on the effects of weather on the D.C. mindset.