Belgium logged nearly 3,000 excess deaths during successive heatwaves since June, health authorities said Thursday, days after this summer was confirmed as the hottest on record in the northern European nation.

Some 365 excess deaths were observed between July 28 and August 16, as Belgium sweltered under a third heatwave, adding to the almost 2,600 excess deaths recorded during the previous two bouts of high temperatures, the Sciensano national public health institute said.

Britain's sweltering summer of successive heat waves was the hottest on record, the national weather service said Tuesday.

The season, marked by extreme heat, little rainfall, destructive wildfires and water restrictions, snapped the record set only a year earlier, the Met Office said, citing provisional data recorded since 1884.

When a wall of water, rocks and mud tore through her remote village in Nepal last week, Pema Tamang and her neighbors fled uphill to a Buddhist shrine that had been rebuilt the previous year after a 2015 earthquake.

The steep mountain folds of the Himalayas, already prone to earthquakes, have seen more frequent flash floods as high mountain glaciers melt, redrawing rivers at sometimes terrifying speed. Residents have had little time to rebuild from one disaster to the next, raising concerns over whether their communities can endure as climate change accelerates.

Italian fishermen for two years incinerated most of the invasive Atlantic blue crabs caught in the Po River Delta south of Venice. Few Italians had an appetite for the alien predator blamed for decimating their prized Manila clams.

While experiments in containment continue, including the release of tens of thousands of octopus predators, the industry's response has been shifting to find new markets for the crustaceans. The strategy is already salvaging the livelihood of some fishermen and, some hope, may even rehabilitate the much-maligned crab's image in Italy.

In a strategic retreat in the fight against climate change, the United Nations has acknowledged that Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming's harms. So now the world must figure out how to get temperatures below the danger zone and back to safety, officials say.

Earth is soon going to exceed the safe temperature threshold agreed upon by the world in the 2015 Paris climate accord because of warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas, according to a bleak first-of-its-kind report issued by the United Nations Environment Programme Wednesday.

In crowded subway cars and sun-drenched plazas, an old-fashioned accessory in Spain has been everywhere thanks to the blistering summer heat.

Small enough to fit into a purse, the traditional Spanish folding hand fan, or abanico, snaps open into a semicircle. With little more than a flick of the wrist, it creates a surprisingly strong breeze.

The death toll from catastrophic flooding in Nepal and China rose over 1,000 on Tuesday, authorities said, as rescue teams worked to reach communities cut off by the disaster.

Nepal's disaster agency said Tuesday that 987 deaths had been counted there, with 3,916 people missing, including 583 foreigners. Chinese authorities, in their latest update on Sunday, reported 16 deaths and 546 people still missing, including 261 foreigners.

Workers shoveled thick mud from a flood-ravaged power station in central Nepal, trying to revive a key node that supplies electricity to more than 20,000 people. But as they cleared debris from equipment buried by last week's catastrophic floods, there was hope the plant would not simply be rebuilt in the same place, beside the river that destroyed it.

In Nepal, up to 900 workers are unaccounted for from a dozen hydropower projects, according to the Independent Power Producers' Association, Nepal, with hundreds believed trapped in tunnels. In Nepal and China combined, over 900 people have died and 4,700 are missing.

Rescuers were trying to find trapped workers in at least a dozen hydroelectric plant sites Monday after catastrophic flooding in Nepal and Tibet killed at least 900 people and left more than 4,700 missing.

Multiple foreign teams were assisting local rescuers to find workers in multiple tunnels at Nepal's power plants on the rivers that flooded last Wednesday.

Tropical Storms Karina and Lowell formed Thursday in the Pacific Ocean, both of which were expected to become hurricanes in the next few days, the National Hurricane Center said.

Tropical Storm Karina was located about 825 miles (1,330 kilometers) south of the southern tip of Baja California, with maximum sustained winds of around 45 mph (75 kph), according to an advisory from the Miami-based hurricane center. Tropical Storm Lowell was about 1,765 miles (2,840 kilometers) west-southwest of the tip of Baja California, with maximum sustained winds of around 40 mph (65 kph).