#2 Hurricane Florence prompts warning: ‘You put your life at risk by staying’

By Jason Hanna, Kaylee Hartung and Steve Almasy, CNN
Updated 7:09 PM ET, Wed September 12, 2018
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#3 Dallas officer who entered wrong apartment, killed man, arrested on manslaughter charge
A Dallas police officer who allegedly entered an apartment that she believed was her own and fatally shot the resident was arrested Sunday for investigation of manslaughter.
Amber Guyger, 30, a four-year veteran with the Dallas Police Department, allegedly went into the wrong apartment in her building last Thursday night and fatally shot Botham Shem Jean, a 26-year-old native of the Caribbean island of St. Lucia.
Guyger, of Dallas, was arrested in Kaufman County and booked into the Kaufman County Jail, the Texas Rangers said in a statement.
Guyger was released Sunday night on $300,000 bail, NBC Dallas-Fort Worth reported.
The shooting just before 10 p.m. local time (11 p.m. ET) at the South Side Flats, an upscale apartment building south of Dallas’ downtown, occurred when Guyger was off-duty, police said.
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#4 US to close Palestinian mission in Washington: PLO
The United States has decided to close the Palestinian mission in Washington in the latest move against them by President Donald Trump, a Palestinian official said Monday, denouncing it as a "dangerous escalation."
"We have been notified by a US official of their decision to close the Palestinian mission to the US," Palestine Liberation Organisation secretary-general Saeb Erekat said in a statement.
"This is yet another affirmation of the Trump administration's policy to collectively punish the Palestinian people, including by cutting financial support for humanitarian services including health and education."
The Palestinian leadership cut off contact with the Trump administration after the US president recognised the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel's capital in December.
Trump has since pledged to withhold aid from the Palestinians until they return to the negotiating table as his White House seeks to craft a plan for Middle East peace -- what he has called the "ultimate deal."
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#5 Miss New York Nia Imani Franklin wins Miss America pageant

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — Miss New York Nia Imani Franklin was named Miss America 2019 in Atlantic City.
Her victory Sunday night resurrected a string of successes the Empire State has had in the pageant in recent years. Mallory Hagan, Nina Davuluri and Kira Kazantsev won the title from 2013 to 2015 competing as Miss New York.
A classical vocalist whose pageant platform is "advocating for the arts," Franklin sang an operatic selection from the opera La Boheme on Sunday night.
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#6 Who’s taping now? In Trump’s world, everything is recorded.

© Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images
Donald Trump attends a “Celebrity Apprentice” red carpet event at Trump Tower in 2015.
Video or it didn’t happen.
That was almost the lesson nearly two years ago when The Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape capturing Donald Trump on a hot mic bragging about grabbing women’s genitals.
Except the world learned something else. With Trump, the normal rules don’t apply: Even with a video, there are those who will still argue it didn’t happen.
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By the end of November, Trump started to question the validity of the recording to aides. In January, just before his inauguration, he told a Republican senator that he wanted to investigate it and didn’t think it was his voice.
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#7 Trump’s authority crisis deepens
Donald Trump's presidency is slipping deeper into a crisis of authority at a critical moment.
Midterm elections are looming, he's facing new questions about his fitness for office, and he's hunting a hidden rebel within his own camp.
Typifying the sense that what would once seem absurd now counts for normality in this White House, Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday offered to take a lie detector test to prove he was not the author of an op-ed by an anonymous senior official in The New York Times that assailed Trump for "half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless" leadership.
Pence and the President's counselor, Kellyanne Conway, tried to put the spotlight on the motives of the anonymous official, warning that there could be "criminal" dimensions to the op-ed, boosting Trump's calls for a Justice Department investigation.
But the controversy is unlikely to ease in the week ahead. Bob Woodward's new book -- which, combined with the op-ed, sent the White House reeling -- is due to be published on Tuesday, and the veteran journalist is promoting his damning account of the President's leadership.
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#8 Intensifying Hurricane Florence could strike US Southeast
Video by FOX News
Rapidly intensifying Hurricane Florence could strike a direct and dangerous blow anywhere from the Carolinas to the Mid-Atlantic region later this week, possibly as a fearsome category 4.
A hurricane hunter plane found Florence strengthening quickly, reaching top winds of 85 mph (140 kph) Sunday evening after crossing the 74 mph threshold from tropical storm to a hurricane earlier in the day.
Forecasters said Florence was expected to become an extremely dangerous major hurricane sometime Monday, and remain that way for days.
As of 5 a.m. EDT, Florence was centered about 625 miles (1,005 kilometers) southeast of Bermuda, moving west at 9 mph (15 kph). Its maximum sustained winds are at 105 mph (165 kph). Drawing energy from the warm water, it could have top sustained winds of 130 mph (209 kph) or more by Tuesday, the Miami-based center said.
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#9 Misfire: Maria Butina’s strange route from Russia to US jail
MOSCOW — When Maria Butina arrived in Moscow from Siberia in 2011 to launch a Russian version of the National Rifle Association, her shooting range coach said she didn't even know how to fire a weapon.
She learned fast, but her far-fetched bid to liberalize gun rights in Russia flamed out. By the time she arrived in Washington in 2014 to network with the NRA, she was peddling a Russian gun rights movement that was already dead.
Fellow gun enthusiasts and arms industry officials described to The Associated Press the strange trajectory of a Russian gun lobby project that appeared doomed from the start — with President Vladimir Putin among its many opponents.
U.S. court papers suggest the movement was a ruse, allowing Butina and influential patron Alexander Torshin to infiltrate the NRA and pursue covert Russian back channels to American conservatives as Donald Trump rose to power.
Jailed since July on charges of working as an undeclared foreign agent, the 29-year-old Butina faces a hearing Monday in Washington.
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#10 Trump Claims Credit for the Economy. Not So Fast, Says Obama.
WASHINGTON — The economy is doing quite well, thank you very much, and the president would naturally like to take credit. Both of them.
Barely a day passes without President Trump boasting about the growing economy, claiming with a mix of hyperbole and fact that it is “booming like never before.” But former President Barack Obama finds all the Trumpian chest-thumping more than a little grating, given that the “booming” started on his watch.
The economic contest between the 44th and 45th presidents went public in recent days when Mr. Obama expressed his irritation and Mr. Trump fired back. At stake are more than ordinary political bragging rights. Central to Mr. Obama’s historical legacy is the economy’s recovery after its plummet to the brink of a new Great Depression. And central to Mr. Trump’s current political standing is its further expansion.
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