Colin Dwyer

Editor's Note: This story contains graphic descriptions that some readers may find disturbing.

Nearly a week after a Pennsylvania grand jury released its roughly 900-page report on sexual abuse by clergy, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church has penned a letter condemning the alleged misconduct and pledging repentance.

Somewhere deep in Siberia, a strungout Russian scientist has a little wisdom to offer.

It was just after 7:30 p.m. on July 26 when dispatchers heard Jeremy Stoke's mayday call. The fire inspector had been in his pickup heading to evacuate a neighborhood in northwest Redding, Calif., when he was trapped by the blaze himself.

Only silence answered the dispatchers' replies. They found Stoke's body the next day.

Nearly a year since Myanmar began its bloody crackdown on the Rohingya, driving more than 700,00 members of the Muslim minority group to flee, the U.S. is sanctioning several high-level commanders and units in the country's armed forces.

The Treasury Department announced the penalties Friday, saying they're part of a "strategy to hold accountable those responsible for such wide scale human suffering."

Monsoon rains are lashing southern India, where water has overrun riverbanks, submerged city buildings and left a death toll of dozens of people. The chief minister of Kerala, the state hit hardest by the storms, has described the situation as "an unprecedented flood havoc."

Determined to combat New Zealand's lofty housing prices, the country's lawmakers have trained their aim at a distant target: the buyers beyond their borders. By a close vote Wednesday, the Parliament passed a law banning most nonresident foreigners from purchasing existing homes or residential land.

Just days after President Trump tweeted his decision to double tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminum, Turkey has announced that it, too, is ratcheting up retaliatory tariffs.

"Tax rates on imports of some products have been increased on a reciprocal basis against the U.S. administration's deliberate attacks on our economy," the country's vice president, Fuat Oktay, said in a pair of tweets.

Tinder's co-founders, along with eight other current and former executives, have slapped the popular dating app's owners with a massive lawsuit. In the suit filed Tuesday in New York, the Tinder employees past and present say the companies that own the app deliberately undervalued it to swindle them out of the money they were owed.

In the grand pantheon of cafeteria misdeeds, few are more dastardly than the crime of stealing lunch money. And popular culture offers up no end of usual suspects, from vindictive older siblings to schoolyard bully.

But in New Canaan, Conn., the whodunit has taken a new twist. Police say two unusual culprits are to blame after two public schools mysteriously lost nearly $500,000 of lunch money in a five-year span — the cafeteria workers behind the register.

Turkey's currency is in a bad way.

That much is evident from the past week, which has seen the lira tumble in value at a breakneck pace. It has dropped more than 40 percent against the U.S. dollar on the year, with much of that plunge unfolding since the start of August. Before a modest rally early Monday, a single dollar bought about 7.2 lira — a grim new record for Turkey.

In the tumultuous two weeks surrounding Zimbabwe's presidential election --the country's first since the ouster of longtime strongman Robert Mugabe --opposition leader Nelson Chamisa has made no secret of what he thinks of its results.

Since the Holy Fire ignited Monday in Orange County, Calif., the blaze ravaged more than 10,000 acres, destroyed at least 12 structures and forced more than 21,000 people to evacuate their homes by Thursday night. But amid all these grim and rising numbers, California's Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has listed just one cause: "human."

Dozens of students were returning from a summer camp when their driver paused to grab a something at a market in Yemen's Saada province. It was there, as the students sat waiting to resume their journey home on Thursday, that a Saudi-led coalition airstrike hit their school bus.

A deceptively simple hashtag has climbed to the top of Twitter's trending lists across Argentina: #EsHoy, or "It's Today." The phrase, imbued as it is with fervent expectation, may seem puzzling to outsiders — but inside the country, the meaning is crystal clear.

On Monday, one day before Ivory Coast celebrated 58 years of independence, the West African country's leader announced that he is granting liberty of another kind to hundreds of Ivorians. In a nationally televised address President Alassane Ouattara declared amnesty for some 800 people involved in the bloodshed that followed the 2010 election — including one of the country's most notorious convicts, its former first lady Simone Gbagbo.

In the past several days a dust-up between two unusual antagonists has derailed the work of ambassadors, caused the suspension of "all new business" between the two countries — even the posting (and subsequent deletion) of a tweet that drew international outrage.

But what in the world could have caused such a dispute between Canada and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and how could things have escalated this quickly? The origins of this story can be found with a couple of recent arrests, as well as the tweets they drew in response.

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Just after the clock strikes midnight, it will usher in a new day and a return to past U.S. policy: As of 12:01 a.m. ET Tuesday, the Trump administration says it will restore some of the sanctions against Iran that were lifted as part of the 2015 nuclear deal.

The man suspected of shooting renowned cardiologist Mark Hausknecht, who treated a former U.S. president, killed himself Friday. Authorities say Joseph James Pappas, 62, died when confronted by two Houston police officers at the end of a manhunt Friday morning.

"I thank God that that second officer got there when he got there, because the suspect was not complying with the commands of the [first] officer," Houston police Chief Art Acevedo said at a midday news conference. "I'm convinced that had that second officer not arrived, we might have had a shootout out here."

One week away from the release date of Madden NFL 19, some folks have already picked up an early copy of the perennial gaming powerhouse. And as they perused the video game's menu, at least one user heard something a little bit off.

During a song on the soundtrack, YG's "Big Bank," Big Sean's guest verse goes quiet for a second or two — just as one may expect of a track edited for a game with a wide audience, censoring obscenities for the sake of young listeners.

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The U.S. is imposing sanctions against two high-level Turkish officials, retaliating for what the Treasury Department calls the "unfair and unjust detention" of an American pastor in Izmir. The penalties announced Wednesday, which aim to punish the chiefs of Turkey's ministries of justice and the interior, mark a significant escalation in the recent frictions between the two key NATO allies.

Updated at 2:55 p.m. ET

When voters took to the polls Monday in Zimbabwe, the air was thick with anticipation for a new political era following the ouster of strongman Robert Mugabe. But with that excitement came the dread that violence and alleged fraud, which for so long dogged elections during Mugabe's 37-year rule, might yet rear their heads again.

For a brief moment last week, just off the coast of southwestern Canada, the typically grim outlook confronting orcas took on a hopeful hue. A whale watch operator, staring through binoculars, had caught sight of a healthy calf swimming beside its mother — a rare beacon for a population that had not seen a healthy infant in years.

It was not to last, however. By the time experts with the Center for Whale Research arrived, just half an hour later, the calf had already died.

But that's not the end of this story.

For a brief while on the mound Sunday, Sean Newcomb stood atop the world. The young Atlanta Braves pitcher had thrown more than eight scoreless innings and allowed zero hits — until, with just one strike left to close it out, a line-drive single derailed his bid for the Braves' first no-hitter in a quarter-century.

Not since a deadly famine was ravaging North Korea in 1997 has the country seen its economy contract at such a large rate as it did last year. After a couple of years of growth, the country's estimated gross domestic product went reeling in the other direction in 2017, shrinking 3.5 percent, according to South Korea's central bank.

The world was a demonstrably different place when Kevin Anderson and John Isner first took the court Friday for what would become a marathon Wimbledon semifinal. Tough as it may be to recall that heady era when the world was still young, we assure you it existed.

But boy does it look distant now.

Updated at 4:41 p.m. ET