Weather

With at least 13 people dead and some 40,000 homes damaged by flooding in Louisiana, the Red Cross has called the resulting devastation the worst US disaster since the 2012 Hurricane Sandy. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is visiting the state.

The East Coast is bracing for a weekend of potential flooding as Hurricane Joaquin bears down on the Bahamas. The storm was upgraded from a tropical storm to a Category 3 hurricane, and weather forecasters expect it to turn northwards towards the US.

Wildfires in Alaska this summer that have burned almost 5 million acres total are now threatening to melt permafrost below the ground surface which contains carbon, a leading driver of global climate change.

A heavy storm forced more than a million people to leave their homes on the Chinese east coast not far from Shanghai on Saturday. Typhoon Chan-hom might be the strongest to hit the region in over 60 years, the national weather service said.

Facebook announced it will use 100 percent wind energy to run its new data center in Texas. The social networking giant has committed to powering all its operations with 50 percent renewable energy in the next three years.

The mayor of Poway, California has admitted that 500,000 gallons of water were wasted based on an unsafe chemical imbalance despite the town's successful conservation efforts during historic drought conditions.

In its heyday some 6,000 years ago, a lake called Mega-Chad was the largest body of fresh water on the planet, with an area of 360,000 square km. A few hundred years later it's reduced to Lake Chad at only 355 square km, and an air of faded grandeur left.

Dramatic footage has been released of the rescue of two fishermen after their ship sank in rough seas off the coast of northern Norway. The video shows the men being saved from raging waters, winched from their inflatable lifeboat to a helicopter.

A tornado hit several villages in the Dnepropetrovsk region in Ukraine’s south this week. Locals reported that roofs were blown off, trees torn from the ground, and fish from the river covered the roads, adding they had never seen anything like it before.