Heavy rain in the past week has triggered floods and landslides in Japan, disrupting transportation and forcing residents to take shelter on safer ground. Four people were missing Friday, including two police officers.

The rain had subsided in Yamagata and Akita prefectures Friday, but the area was still at risk of flooding and landslides. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida urged people to "put safety first."

Taiwan has seen flooding in low-lying areas, along with landslides and damage to homes and shops after Typhoon Gaemi made landfall on the island.

The storm swept up the western Pacific, leaving 22 people dead in the Philippines from flooding and landslides, and three in Taiwan, with more than 220 reported injured.

Global temperatures dropped a minuscule amount after two days of record highs, making Tuesday only the world's second-hottest day ever.

The European climate service Copernicus calculated that Tuesday's global average temperature was 0.01 Celsius (0.01 Fahrenheit) lower than Monday's all-time high of 17.16 degrees Celsius (62.8 degrees Fahrenheit), which was .06 degrees Celsius hotter (0.1 degrees Fahrenheit) than Sunday.

To combat ongoing destruction in the Amazon rainforest, Brazil announced a plan Tuesday to dramatically expand selective logging to an area the size of Costa Rica over the next two years.

In Brazil, vast forest lands are designated as public yet have no special protection or enforcement and are vulnerable to land grabbing and illegal deforestation. Criminals frequently take over land and clear it, hoping the government will eventually recognize them as owners, which usually happens.

When Benson Wanjala started farming in his western Kenya village two and a half decades ago, his 10-acre farm could produce a bountiful harvest of 200 bags of maize. That has dwindled to 30. He says his once fertile soil has become a nearly lifeless field that no longer earns him a living.

Like many other farmers, he blames acidifying fertilizers pushed in Kenya and other African countries in recent years. He said he started using the fertilizers to boost his yield and it worked — until it didn't. Kenya's government first introduced a fertilizer subsidy in 2008, making chemical fertilizers more accessible for smaller-scale farmers.

Golden fields of wheat no longer produce the bounty they once did in Morocco. A six-year drought has imperiled the country's entire agriculture sector, including farmers who grow cereals and grains used to feed humans and livestock.

The North African nation projects this year's harvest will be smaller than last year in both volume and acreage, putting farmers out of work and requiring more imports and government subsidies to prevent the price of staples like flour from rising for everyday consumers.

On Sunday, the Earth sizzled to the hottest day ever measured by humans, yet another heat record shattered in the past couple of years, according to the European climate service Copernicus.

Copernicus' preliminary data shows that the global average temperature Sunday was 17.09 degrees Celsius (62.76 degrees Fahrenheit), beating the record set just last year on July 6, 2023 by .01 degrees Celsius (.02 degrees Fahrenheit). Both Sunday's mark and last year's record obliterate the previous record of 16.8 degrees Celsius (62.24 degrees Fahrenheit), which itself was only a few years old, set in 2016.

Floyd County keeps flooding and the federal government keeps coming to the rescue.

In July 2022, at least 40 people died and 300 homes were damaged when the eastern Kentucky county flooded. It was the 13th time in 12 years that the rural county was declared a federal disaster. These are disasters so costly that local governments feel they can't pay for it all, so the governor asks the president to declare a disaster freeing up federal funds.

At least a half-dozen homes lay in ruins after one of many dangerous wildfires in the West suddenly swept into a Southern California neighborhood during a blistering heat wave.

Six homes were ravaged and seven damaged when the fire sparked by fireworks erupted Sunday afternoon in a hilly area of Riverside, a city about 60 miles (95 kilometers) east of Los Angeles, authorities said at a media briefing Monday evening.

At least 157 people were killed in mudslides in a remote part of Ethiopia that has been hit with heavy rainfall, many of them as they tried to rescue survivors of an earlier mudslide, local authorities said Tuesday.

Young children and pregnant women were among the victims of the mudslides in the Kencho Shacha Gozdi district of southern Ethiopia, said Dagmawi Ayele, a local administrator.