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LONDON – Queen Elizabeth II ended 2019 with a public plea for global harmony after a rocky year. She’s starting 2020 trying to heal disharmony within her own family after Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, decided to “step back” as senior royals – and announced the news without consulting the monarch.

As the British media went into meltdown, the royal matriarch moved quickly to take back control, summoning her son and heir Prince Charles and grandsons Prince William and Harry to a crisis meeting to sort things out.

SAN FRANCISCO – Another bit of old, quirky San Francisco will be no more when Tom Sweeney finally hangs up his white pressed collar and signature Beefeater jacket this weekend after more than four decades of opening doors at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel downtown.

Sweeney has taken the luggage of movie stars and shaken hands with every U.S. president from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama.

ATHENS, Greece – Greece's coast guard said 12 migrants have been found dead in the Ionian Sea and 21 others have been rescued after their boat took in water and sank.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – A magnitude 5.9 quake shook Puerto Rico on Saturday, causing millions of dollars of damage along the island’s southern coast, where previous recent quakes have toppled homes and schools.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the 8:54 a.m. quake hit 8 miles southeast of Guanica at a shallow depth of 3 miles.

WASHINGTON – At home and in their own lives, Americans by and large have an upbeat view of the year to come. When it comes to how the country will fare in 2020, well, that’s another matter.

A new poll released Friday by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that close to 4 in 10 Americans expect a better year ahead for them personally, while another half expect things to stay about the same.

WASHINGTON – Hear ye, hear ye: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is hitting the send button on President Donald Trump’s impeachment.

That’s after she paused the whole constitutional matter, producing a three-week standoff with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and complicating the campaigning picture for the five Democratic senators in the White House race.

By Friday, three weeks before the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, what leverage Pelosi, D-Calif., had possessed was in question.

WASHINGTON – In a defining week for President Donald Trump on the world stage, national security adviser Robert O’Brien was a constant presence at the president’s side as the U.S.

HOUSTON – Severe storms sweeping across southern portions of the U.S. and up into the Midwest were blamed Saturday in the deaths of at least 11 people, including two first responders, as high winds, tornadoes and unrelenting rain battered large swaths of the country.

Storm-related fatalities were reported in Texas due to icy weather, in Alabama from a deadly tornado and in Louisiana, where winds were so strong that a trailer home was lifted off its foundation and carried several hundred feet.

BURRAGATE, Australia – A firefighter was killed by a falling tree while b attling the Australian wildfire crisis overnight and the prime minister on Sunday said his government was adapting and building resilience to the fire danger posed by climate change.

Bill Slade – one of the few professionals among mainly volunteer brigades battling blazes across southeast Australia – died Saturday near Omeo in eastern Victoria state, Forest Fire Management Victoria Executive Director Chris Hardman said.

The 60-year-old marrie

FREEPORT – Freezing rain left roads and trees glazed with ice Saturday across parts of northern Illinois as a winter storm packing a mixed bag of precipitation cut power to about 5,000 homes and businesses across the region.

ComEd customers were without power Saturday afternoon in northwestern and northern Illinois.