The shark attack occurred in Hook Passage in the Whitsunday Islands off Australia's Queensland coast, rescuers say.
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The head of United States Central Command says Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was buried at sea after a weekend raid on his compound. Gen. Frank McKenzie told reporters Wednesday that al-Baghdadi died after he exploded a suicide vest just before U.S. troops were going to capture him. McKenzie says two children were killed in the explosion set off by the Islamic State leader.
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California governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, has accepted large donations from Pacific Gas & Electric Co., a utility company he now excoriates for "greed" and "mismanagement."PG&E has faced widespread criticism for implementing blackouts for millions of customers to avoid sparking wildfires in the midst of California's dry and windy fall weather."I have a message for PG&E," Newsom wrote on Twitter on Friday. "Your years and years of greed. Years and years of mismanagement. Years and years of putting shareholders over people. Are OVER."Newsom and allies accepted $208,400 from the utility during his 2018 gubernatorial campaign, according to local affiliate ABC10. Of that total, $150,000 went to a political spending group called “Citizens Supporting Gavin Newsom for Governor 2018,” while the rest went to directly to Newsom's campaign.PG&E filed for bankruptcy in January 2019. Faulty PG&E electricity equipment has been blamed for sparking several wildfires in the past decade.California has consistently shut down proposals to clear dead trees from forests and to trim trees near power lines state wide, creating conditions for a rash of wildfire outbreaks in recent years.The Kincaid Fire currently burning in Sonoma County in the northern part of the state has forced the evacuation of roughly 200,000 people. The fire is twice the size of the city of San Fransisco.Newsom declared a state of emergency on Sunday in response to the Kincaid Fire and several other wildfires throughout the state. He again threatened PG&E in a statement on the situation."There is a plan to get out of this. This is not the new normal,” Newsom said on Sunday at an evacuation center in northern California. “This is not a 10-year process to deal with this. That will not be the case… [PG&E] will be held to account to do something radically different
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U.S. prosecutors on Tuesday accused President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn of making "an extraordinary reversal" to try to undo his sworn admission that he lied to former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigators about his contacts with Russia. Federal prosecutors asked U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan for the opportunity to oppose a bid filed by Flynn's lawyers last week to have the case dismissed - even though Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 - because of alleged prosecutorial misconduct. The retired Army lieutenant general and former Trump campaign adviser has pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his 2016 conversations with Sergey Kislyak, then-Russian ambassador to the United States.
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A Roman Catholic priest's denial of communion to Joe Biden in South Carolina on Sunday illustrates the fine line presidential candidates must walk as they talk about their faiths: balancing religious values with a campaign that asks them to choose a side in polarizing moral debates. The awkward moment for Biden came during a weekend campaign swing through South Carolina, a pivotal firewall in his hopes to claim the Democratic presidential nomination. The former vice president on Sunday visited St. Anthony Catholic Church in Florence, a midsize city in the state's largely rural northeast.
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Frustration and anger mounted across Northern California as the state's biggest utility began another round of fire-prevention blackouts Tuesday that could leave millions of people without electricity, some for five days or longer. The shut-offs, aimed at keeping windblown electrical equipment from sparking wildfires, came as fire crews raced to contain two major blazes in Northern and Southern California before the winds picked up dangerously again. The fires have destroyed dozens of homes in Sonoma County wine country and in the hills of Los Angeles.
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Fox NewsFox News host Tucker Carlson and his guest, conservative YouTube personality Dave Rubin, both insisted Tuesday night that the wildfires burning across California are due largely to progressive ideology, “woke” culture, and diversity in hiring.During Tuesday’s broadcast of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson welcomed on Rubin, a political commentator and podcaster, to discuss the issues surrounding the large fires engulfing the state, including those related to the electrical grid and firefighting methods.“PG&E; strikes me as almost a metaphor for the destruction of the state,” Carlson said about the state’s power company. “Here’s the utility which doesn’t really know anything about its own infrastructure but knows everything about the race of its employees. How did we get there?”After noting that he lives near one of the fires in the Los Angeles area, Rubin immediately took aim at liberal politics as the main reason the wildfires have grown so large and dangerous.“The problem right now is that everything, EVERYTHING, from academia to public utilities to politics, everything that goes woke, that buys into this ridiculous progressive ideology that cares about what contractors are LGBT or how many black firemen we have or white this or Asian that, everything that goes that road eventually breaks down,” he declared.As Carlson nodded and said “that’s true,” Rubin continued, complaining that this isn’t how “freedom is supposed to operate.”“What is supposed to happen—imagine if your house was on fire,” he added. “Would you care what the public utility or what the fire company, what contractor they brought in, what gender or sexuality or any of those things he or she was? It’s just absolutely ridiculous.”The Fox News host continued to agree with Rubin, who went on to tie PG&E;’s preemptive blackouts to a lack of “libertarian or conservative-minded people in California to fight what the progressives are doing to the state.”“If you can’t keep the lights on and you can’t keep the place from burning down, you’ve reached the point where there is no kind of lying about it anymore,” Carlson concluded. “It’s falling apart. It’s a disaster. It’s not civilized anymore.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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Resolution comes at delicate time in US-Turkey relationship, shortly after House votes to impose sanctionsPeople take part in a torchlight procession as they mark the 104th anniversary of the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman forces, Yerevan, Armenia. Photograph: Karen Minasyan/AFP/Getty ImagesThe US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to recognize the Armenian genocide of a century ago, stepping into a fraught historical debate at a particularly tense moment for the US-Turkey relationship.The House voted 405-11 in favor of the resolution, which is not legally binding, to formally recognize the systematic killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire in 1915, modern-day Turkey, as a “genocide”.Earlier on Tuesday, the House voted 403 to 16 to impose sanctions on Turkey, in a striking rebuke of Donald Trump after he pulled American forces from northern Syria following a phone call with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, paving the way for Turkey’s assault on Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria.The Turkish government has long denied the term genocide to describe the slaughter and has waged a lobbying campaign in the US and around the world to discourage the use of that word in reference to the killings.Many countries and nearly all US states officially recognize the killings as genocide. But the US Congress has resisted pressure in recent years by activists out of a desire not to inflame tensions with a Nato ally. Support for a resolution grew, particularly among Democrats, after Trump enabled the Turkish offensive against the Kurdish groups.The US had previously allied with Syrian Kurdish forces against militants of the Islamic State group. The Turkish offensive left scores of Kurdish fighters and civilians dead and displaced hundreds of thousands more.“If we ignore history, then we are destined to witness the mistakes of the past be repeated,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said, urging support for the resolution on Tuesday. “Recent attacks by the Turkish military against the Kurdish people are a stark reminder of the danger in our own time.”The California Democrat Adam Schiff, a sponsor of the resolution, said in a statement: “The House declared that it will no longer be party to the cause of genocide denial. This is a vote I have fought for 19 years to make possible, and one that tens of thousands of my Armenian American constituents have worked, struggled, and prayed for decades to see.”The vote on the bipartisan resolution came on the heels of House passage of economic sanctions against Turkey.There is a bipartisan resolution in the Senate but it is unclear if the chamber will bring the measure to the floor.In a statement, the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, condemned the move, which he called “a meaningless political step” and an “attempt to rewrite history”.“The US Administration and politicians as well as the American people are best placed to consider the damages this resolution seeking to disrupt Turkey-US ties does and will inflict upon the US interests at an extremely fragile time in terms of the international and regional security,” the statement said, adding: “Undoubtedly, this resolution will negatively affect the image of the US before the public opinion of Turkey as it also brings the dignity of the US House of Representatives into disrepute.”But on Capitol Hill, the resolution’s passage was celebrated. California congresswoman Anna Eshoo, who is Armenian American, said she had been “waiting for this moment” since she was first elected to Congress more than a quarter-century ago. “This resolution not only honors and commemorates my ancestors who perished but all those who were lost in the first genocide of the 20th century,” she said.
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House impeachment investigators have invited John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Donald Trump, to testify before Congress next week, according to reports.Mr Bolton was reportedly called on by House investigators to give evidence for their impeachment inquiry into Mr Trump surrounding the president’s dealings with Ukraine.
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