A newborn baby girl was found abandoned on a beach in Hawaii, according to reports.

The 8-pound child was “abandoned immediately after birth,” state Department of Human Services Director Patricia McManaman said, according to the Star Advertiser newspaper. She was found just before midnight on Sunday.

McManaman said the girl was “doing quite well” and drinking formula, HawaiiNewsNow.com reported.

Both reports said the child was found on Sandy Beach by a 21-year-old woman, who took her to a local medical center. The woman is not a suspect, according to police.

The mother has not been identified, HawaiiNewsNow.com said.

Jonathan Kamai, a Sandy Beach regular, told the website that he was glad “the child had an angel that came and helped her out.”

“It would have to be something tragic for someone to just leave their newborn here," he added. “Just as a father, how somebody could actually just do that kind of stuff – it's just crazy.”

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A former Marine has been arrested in the beating of two men outside a popular gay bar in Southern California last year and will face hate-crime charges for using anti-gay slurs during the attack, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said Thursday.

John Kelly O'Leary, 21, was arrested Monday by police in Evergreen Park, Ill., Deputy District Attorney Gretchen Ford of the hate crimes unit said in a statement. O'Leary was discharged from the Marines on Oct. 19, about six weeks after the attack, Marine Corps’ spokesman Master Gunnery Sgt. Mark Oliva told NBC News. He will be extradited from Illinois to California to face the charges.

O'Leary and a group of friends, including other Marines, went to the Silver Fox bar in Long Beach, Calif. in the early morning hours of Sept. 3, 2012. O'Leary was accused of shouting anti-gay slurs outside the bar at closing time, which triggered the hate crime charge, said Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the district attorney's office.

"Following a verbal exchange with one of two alleged victims, O’Leary allegedly turned and began punching the first alleged victim as he continued to shout anti-gay slurs. The victim, who suffered a concussion and a fractured hip during the altercation, was knocked unconscious," the statement said. "As others joined in to break up the fight, O’Leary allegedly began punching and choking a second male victim before police arrived."

O'Leary has been charged with two felonies – battery with serious bodily injury and assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury – and faces up to eight years in prison, which includes time for the hate crime allegation, Robison said. The Press-Telegram of Long Beach first reported the charges.

Authorities arrested three other Marines after the attack, but they were not charged, the district attorney's office said. Robison said they were attempting to break up the assault, and Oliva said they were on active duty with their commands.

The four Marines, based at Camp Pendleton in southern California, were in their first enlistment. Oliva characterized O’Leary’s discharge as “less than honorable,” but he didn’t have the exact nature of it. He also said the Marine Corps was still conducting an inquiry into the attack.

Robison said she didn't know if the two victims were gay. Immediately after the attack, CBSLA.com reported that one of the victims had gone to the bar with his boyfriend and that he had blacked out from the assault. He was hospitalized overnight and released with non-life threatening injuries, Long Beach police said at the time.

O'Leary is being held on $105,000 bail. He has waived extradition and will be transported to Los Angeles some time next week, the district attorney's office said. Attempts to reach O'Leary, his family or an attorney representing him were unsuccessful.

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The grief-stricken mother of a 24-year-old missing woman whose body was found washed up on a New York City beach is looking for answers in the death of her daughter.

The body of Marisha Cheong was found Saturday morning along Jamaica Bay at 149 Bayside Avenue in Roxbury, Queens, police said. She had been missing since December.

"She didn't deserve this," said Cheong's mother, Bibi Ali, as she cried Monday. "They threw her away like trash."

Cheong's hands were tied up, sources said. 

Cheong was living with her boyfriend Latchman Balkaran in Jamaica, Queens, when she went missing Dec. 19. Balkaran told NBC 4 New York the two had been looking forward to the holidays and that she had left their home to go shopping when she disappeared.

"It's just very hard to imagine what could have happened to her," he said. "I just don't know what person or human being would do that to someone."

"She was everything to me," said Balkaran. "My family loved her like a daughter. My sister loved her like a sister."

Read more from NBCNewYork.com

Balkaran said after five years of dating, he was about to propose to Cheong. But her mother painted a different picture of her daughter's longtime boyfriend, saying they had financial problems and that she was suspicious of him.

"He has to know what he did with her," she said. "Only he can tell me what he did with my daughter."

Balkaran responded, "I didn't have anything to do with her death. I am as lost as much as they are. They know how much I loved her."

Ali said police are looking into some text messages, including one she received from her daughter the day before she disappeared.

"I knew in my heart it wasn't her," said Ali. "She doesn't say 'Mom.' She usually says 'Mommy.'"

The medical examiner is still working to determine the cause of death. Police said they have questioned Cheong's boyfriend and her family, and the investigation is ongoing.

A first-time kayaker had a close encounter with a great white shark off the coast of Massachusetts over the weekend.

Sunbathers first spotted the shark following two kayakers on Saturday afternoon off Nauset Beach, the Cape Cod Times reported, and yelled to the men offshore.

One of the kayakers saw the shark and quickly paddled in, while it took the other one, Walter Szulc Jr., of Manchester, N.H., a little while longer to notice the dorsal fin just feet away from him.

“There were hundreds of people on the beach, and they were all at the edge, yelling paddle paddle, paddle!” Dave Alexander told the NBC News affiliate in Boston, WHDH.com.

Szulc said when he looked behind him, the shark "was pretty much right there."

"It was good-sized, it had a fin sticking out, so I just turned and paddled," he told WHDH.com. It was the first time Szulc had kayaked.

Since June 30, three sharks have been seen plying the waters off Cape Cod for food, the Cape Cod Times reported. The large number of seals in the area is believed to be drawing the sharks.

Orleans Harbormaster Dawson Farber said he and his team went out in a boat to confirm the sighting – he noted the shark was an estimated 12 to 14 feet long -- and they had all bathers get out of the water. The beach was also closed.

“Everyone was very relaxed and the shark put on quite a show moving back and forth out in front of the beach, but it was done in a very orderly fashion,” Farber told ABC News.

Witness Debbie Sutton said Szulc “started booking it.”

“You could see the darkness of it,” she told WHDH.com. “It was longer than the kayak … it was crazy big.”

Not all beachgoers were scared by the great white. Some even got into the water at the beach later in the day.

"Everyone wanted to see it," Karen O'Connell of Medfield told the Cape Cod Times. "There were people running toward it."

The last shark attack on a human in the area was in 1936, when a man was killed swimming near Mattapoisett, the newspaper reported.

In central California on Saturday, a shark lifted up a man's kayak, throwing him into the water. The man was rescued by a boater, but the shark bit the kayak, damaging it, according to NBCBayArea.com. In May, two kayakers escaped a great white in California, though the shark gouged one of the kayaks, leaving a 20-inch long and 22-inch wide hole, local media reported.

In 2011, there were 75 unprovoked shark attacks on humans, with 35 percent of those happening in U.S. waters, according to the International Shark Attack File. That number was down from 81 in 2010.

The total number of unprovoked global shark attacks has grown since 1900, the group said, noting that did not necessarily mean there was an increase in the rate of attacks, but that people were spending more time in the water, increasing the chances for interactions between the two.

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An unidentified man whose naked body washed ashore in Flagler Beach, Fla., was murdered, the city's police chief said Wednesday. 

"He was the victim of a homicide by gunshot," Chief Dan Cody told The Daytona Beach News-Journal. "He may have been dumped from a vessel at sea."

The body washed onto the sand Friday evening around 11 p.m. Beach-goers stumbled upon it during a walk and called 911, Cody told msnbc.com.

In addition to the gunshot, there appeared to be trauma to the head, he said. 

"Right now, we still have no idea who he is," Cody said.

Cody said the body had been out at sea for at least three or four days and that fingerprints hadn't helped identify the man. He said that dental records may help.

The police chief said the man was white and 50 to 60 years old. No clothing or personal effects were found on him, Cody said, and no reports of missing people in the area fit the man's description.

A police artist is working on a sketch of the man in hopes that someone can identify him, he said.

This is the second body to wash up on Flagler Beach's shores in the past last 11 months. The first body was also that of a man and his death was ruled a suicide.

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Alexandra Chaar.

One 21-year-old Florida waitress has no plans to quit her day job – even after winning a $1 million lottery prize.

"No way," Alexandra Chaar told Florida Lottery officials on Wednesday. "I love where I work."

Chaar, who works at a Mexican restaurant in Clearwater Beach, Fla., said she bought her ticket in the state's $1 million Monopoly Scratch-Off Game at a local food mart.

"I kept going back to the same store to buy them; the people who work there got to know me," Chaar told the lottery commission. "They said that up to this point, their store had never had any big winners, but I just had this lucky feeling."

Chaar chose the one-time, lump-sum payment for her winnings in the amount of $700,000.

According to Tampa Bay Online, Chaar told lottery officials she was a straight-A student at St. Petersburg College and planned to use the money to pay for college.

Until then, she’ll keep working for tips.

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