Schools closed, flights were disrupted and tens of thousands of people were evacuated in southern China as Tropical Storm Tapah made landfall Monday.

The economic hub of Guangdong province near Hong Kong halted some train and ferry services ahead of the storm, according to the official Xinhua news agency. Dozens of scenic areas were closed and some 60,000 people were evacuated across the region by Sunday afternoon, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

The risk of direct impacts from Hurricane Kiko decreased Monday as the tropical cyclone showed signs it would pass to the north of the Hawaiian Islands, forecasters said.

Outside of a mountain village in the northern outskirts of the United Arab Emirates, clouds on a recent weekend suddenly crowded out the white-hot sun that bakes this desert nation in the summer months. Fierce winds blew over planters and pushed a dumpster down the street. And then came the most infrequent visitor of all: rain.

Hurricane Kiko was on a path toward Hawaii over the next several days as post-tropical cyclone Lorena soaked Mexico's Baja California peninsula with heavy rain, forecasters said Friday.

Kiko was a Category 3 hurricane, but far enough away from the Hawaiian Islands that the National Hurricane Center in Miami said it was too early to tell the exact location and severity of impacts expected to reach the 50th U.S. state around the middle part of next week.

Pope Leo XIV fed fish in the fishpond, pet horses and visited organic vineyards Friday as he inaugurated the Vatican's ambitious project to turn Pope Francis' preaching about caring for the environment into practice.

Leo formally opened Borgo Laudato Si, a 55-acre utopian experiment in sustainable farming, vocational training and environmental education located on the grounds of the papal summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo. The Vatican hopes the center, open to student groups, CEOs and others, will be a model of ecological stewardship, education and spirituality for the Catholic Church and beyond.

Authorities in Pakistan's southern Sindh province have evacuated more than 100,000 people from low-lying areas along the Indus river, a government spokesman said on Friday, after neighboring India warned of cross-border flooding from dam release.

The evacuations come as rescuers mounted a major rescue and relief operation in the country's eastern Punjab province, where flooding from weeks of monsoon rains and overflowing dams in India has displaced about 1.8 million people since August.

Deep in Earth's past, an icy landscape became a seascape as the ice melted and the oceans rose off what is now the northeastern United States. Nearly 50 years ago, a U.S. government ship searching for minerals and hydrocarbons in the area drilled into the seafloor to see what it could find.

It found, of all things, drops to drink under the briny deeps — fresh water.

The worst drought in decades is gripping much of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, drying out rivers and lakes, shriveling crops and leading to dayslong tap water cutoffs in major cities.

The situation is particularly dire in Syria, where experts say rainfall has been declining for decades and where the fledgling government is trying to stitch the country back together following a 14-year civil war that left millions impoverished and reliant on foreign aid.

A quick-moving wildfire burned homes in a California Gold Rush town settled around 1850 by Chinese miners who were driven out of a nearby camp and the blaze grew without containment on Wednesday.

The fire rapidly expanded to 10 square miles (26 square kilometers) in size, forcing the evacuation Tuesday of the Chinese Camp Town and surrounding highways, according to CalFire, the state's chief fire agency. There were no immediate reports of injuries or deaths.

India warned Pakistan about possible cross-border flooding for the second time in as many weeks as monsoon deluges cause death and widespread destruction in both countries.

The disaster management authority in eastern Pakistan announced the warning Tuesday.