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Fires are laying waste to wide swathes of land across Australia on scales that are tough to comprehend. In the southeastern state of New South Wales alone, where about 60 fires remain ablaze, the infernos have consumed some 4,000 square miles of land — or an area roughly eight times the size of Los Angeles.

Editor's note: This report includes descriptions of sexual assault.

After more than a decade of investigations into sexual abuse in Pennsylvania's Catholic Church, last year's grand jury report still contained new revelations.

The numbers were superlative — more than 1,000 allegations against 301 priests, spanning seven decades.

When Rose McAdoo got back to New York after spending several months working as a sous chef in Antarctica, her friends had questions. Are there penguins? How do you get supplies? Are you, like, on an iceberg?

McAdoo set about answering their questions the best way she knows how: with cake.

"Cake is my canvas," she says. "It's my way of making big ideas literally digestible."

It's almost always impossible to pinpoint an exact moment in music history when the plates shift. But looking back at the last decade in Latin music, it's easy, now, to see that the release of "Despacito" by Daddy Yankee and Luis Fonsi in early 2017 was just such a moment.

President Trump said Friday he supports pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong. But he stopped short of saying he would sign legislation requiring sanctions against China for any crackdown on Hong Kong protesters.

"We have to stand with Hong Kong, but I'm also standing with President Xi," Trump said in an interview on the Fox News program Fox and Friends. "He's a friend of mine."

There are 8,000 stories in Music City from folks who arrive here with a dream in their hearts for a music career. But how exactly do you get there? There are just as many paths to success.

At the Polish Falcons Hall in Depew, N.Y., one recent Saturday night, five women sat in the center of the crowd mulling the prizes on offer: pork tenderloin, top round roast, Italian sausage. Handcrafted meat-shaped dog chew toys dangled from colorful beads around their necks. Asked what they wanted to win, they exclaimed in unison, "everything!" as they eagerly waved plastic clappers and squeezed squeaking chew toys.

South Korea has reversed its decision to scrap a military intelligence-sharing agreement with Japan, hours before the move was to become official at midnight Friday. South Korea had said in August that it would leave the pact, after Japan removed the country from its "whitelist" of favored trade partners.

The eleventh-hour reversal salvages a 2016 pact brokered by the Obama administration that has allowed South Korea and Japan to share valuable information about their neighbors, most notably North Korea and China.

For decades, I've managed to sneak my family's controversial, Pepto-Bismol-pink cranberry relish recipe onto the air, and 2019 will be no exception. This year I went straight to the source: Bobby J. Chacko, President and CEO of Ocean Spray.

To start off, I want to know: Has he ever stood in a bog? "Absolutely," he answers. "It's one of the most exciting feelings when you're in waders and in water and all you have around are cranberries."

Standing in a sea of crimson, up to his hips in berries and cold water, Chacko says he feels like a kid again.

When news broke earlier this year that Beck's marriage of nearly 15 years was ending, it seemed a safe bet that a certain kind of album would follow: not the surreal, up-tempo Beck of Odelay, Midnite Vultures or Guero, but something melancholy and ballad-heavy — like his album of the year winner, Morning Phase, or his 2002 breakup opus, Sea Change. Stylistically, Beck remains a musical chameleon of remarkable range and elasticity.

Ever since they were kids growing up on Staten Island, N.Y., David Carles and his younger brother Mark Carles have been inseparable.

But in October last year, they were dealt a huge blow: Mark, now 25, was diagnosed with a rare form of liver cancer called fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma.

The brothers, just a year apart in age, still don't know how much time they'll have together; they only know that they want to spend as much of it as they can side by side.

For several nights this month, searchlights have been illuminating the sky on the U.S.-Mexico border between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. They don't have anything to do with stepped-up border enforcement. Instead, they're part of a binational art installation that aims to connect people on both sides of the Rio Grande.

Until Ambassador Gordon Sondland's public testimony on Wednesday, Vice President Pence had managed to keep out of the center of the impeachment inquiry.

For the first time during the public phase of the impeachment hearings, a witness connected Pence to a possible quid pro quo. Sondland said that just ahead of a Sept. 1 meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, he conferred with Pence about a link between U.S. military aid for Ukraine and the investigation that President Trump sought into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The marathon of testimony in Democrats' impeachment inquiry this week confirmed that the Ukraine affair, like so many earlier subplots in the era of President Trump, boils down to two big questions:

What do the president's words mean? Can the president do what he did?

The answers to those questions have been a partisan inkblot test since Trump exploded onto the political scene, and now they are burning again as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats decide how they'll move ahead in a showdown over impeachment.