The death toll in floods in one of South Africa's poorest provinces rose to 57 on Thursday as a top official said rescue attempts had been "paralyzed" by a lack of resources.

Rescue teams are still working through debris and floodwater to find missing people after heavy rain caused a river to burst its banks in the predawn hours of Tuesday. Floods hit the nearby town of Mthatha and surrounding areas, sweeping away victims along with parts of their houses and cars.

At least seven people have died in flooding in South Africa after a weather front bringing heavy rain and snow hit eastern and southern provinces, officials said Tuesday.

A bus carrying high school students was swept away in the floods in the Eastern Cape province and an unknown number of children were missing, the provincial government said in a statement. Three children were rescued after they clung onto trees, according to the South African National Taxi Council, which said the bus was operated by one of its members.

It's one of the most impactful climate decisions we make, and we make it multiple times a day.

The U.N. estimates about a third of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, the main driver of climate change, come from food. That pollution can come from several links in the food supply chain: how farmland is treated, how crops are grown, how food is processed and how it's ultimately transported.

Global heating continued as the new norm, with last month the second warmest May on record on land and in the oceans, according to the European Union's climate monitoring service.

The planet's average surface temperature dipped below the threshold of 1.5 degree Celsius above preindustrial levels, just shy of the record for May set last year, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Greenland's ice sheet melted 17 times faster than the historic average during a May heatwave that also hit Iceland, the scientific network World Weather Attribution (WWA) said in a report Wednesday.

"The melting rate of the Greenland ice sheet by, from a preliminary analysis, a factor of 17... means the Greenland ice sheet contribution to sea level rise is higher than it would have otherwise been without this heatwave," one of the authors of the report, Friederike Otto, told reporters, adding that "without climate change this would have been impossible".

Months before hosting the U.N.'s first climate talks held in the Amazon, Brazil is fast-tracking a series of controversial decisions that undercut President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's lofty environmental rhetoric and show widening divisions within his cabinet.

The country's federal environmental agency approved plans for offshore drilling near the mouth of the Amazon and rock blasting along another river in the rainforest, while Congress is moving to make it harder to recognize Indigenous land and easier to build infrastructure in the rainforest.

The injured fox is cornered in a cage, teeth bared and snarling at the woman trying to help it.

Nicki Townsend is unfazed. Wearing only rubber gloves and an outfit suitable for a yoga class, she approaches with soothing words. "All right, baby," she coos as she deftly drapes a towel over his head, grabs him by the scruff of his neck, scoops up his wounded legs and moves him to a clean cage.

The third U.N. Ocean Conference opened Monday as pressure mounts for nations to turn decades of promises into real protection for the sea.

"The fight for the ocean is at the heart of the yearslong battles we've been waging — for biodiversity, for climate, for our environment and for our health," said French President Emmanuel Macron, delivering the keynote address.

Tropical Storm Barbara gradually weakened Tuesday as it continued heading northwest away from land after earlier strengthening to a hurricane. The storm marked the first hurricane of the eastern Pacific hurricane season.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said swells generated by the storm system will affect portions of the coast of southwestern and west-central Mexico, as well as the southernmost portions of Baja California, on Tuesday. Those swells are likely to cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions.

A blistering heat wave is sweeping across northern India with temperatures soaring above the normal, disrupting daily life and raising health concerns.

The mercury shot up to 47.3 C (117 F) in Sri Ganganagar, a desert city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan on Monday , according to the Indian Meteorological Department.