An unstable mountain rock formation looming above the Swiss village of Kandersteg threatens a landslide that could rival the disaster that destroyed nearby Blatten last year, a collapse scientists linked to thawing permafrost and glacier dynamics.

The 1,300 residents of Kandersteg, in Switzerland's Bern canton, live amid a quintessential Alpine landscape of sharp peaks, white glaciers, steep green valleys and the distant sound of cowbells.

Firefighters were making a potentially decisive push on Tuesday to encircle the massive wildfire burning in Belgium's High Fens nature reserve, despite unfavorable weather hampering air support operations, authorities said.

"We are trying to definitively encircle the fire today," regional government spokesperson Nicolas Yernaux told AFP, saying all focus was on "reinforcing our eastern defenses" with the arrival of "sustained winds" blowing towards the German border a stone's throw away.

One of Belgium's biggest ever wildfires blazed out of control Monday even as cooler weather and rain eased conditions for firefighters, while in Greece a fire briefly flared up near the main airport on the outskirts of Athens.

Europe is sweltering through one of its hottest and driest summers on record, which a recent study said was fueled by climate change.

Torrential rains have pounded southern South Korea, leaving one person dead and four others injured, officials said Monday.

One person died in a landslide that struck an apartment building in the southern city of Geoje on Monday, the Interior and Safety Ministry said in a report. It said two people were injured in Geoje and two others in nearby cities.

Firefighters battled a massive wildfire that scorched a nature reserve in eastern Belgium and another on a Greek island near Athens where two people were killed on Sunday as hot and dry conditions fueled fires across parts of Europe.

A blaze in eastern Belgium burned about 30 square kilometers (12 square miles) in the High Fens, a large nature reserve, in one of the country's worst wildfires in recent history.

Record-breaking rainfall that pounded cities east of Tokyo overnight flooded roads and dozens of homes, stranded thousands of people, caused power outages and left at least four people dead and one missing.

The Japan Meteorological Agency downgraded its most severe warning for heavy rain in more than a dozen municipalities in Chiba prefecture as rain subsided Friday morning but forecast more rain later in the day.

Firefighters across France and in central England struggled against multiple fires Friday as a new wave of record-breaking heat baked a swath of Europe, their task further complicated by exceptionally parched landscapes.

With France experiencing its driest year ever, a new fire raced through woodlands overnight in the Landes region on the southwest coast. The blaze forced more than 500 people to evacuate their homes in the town of Luglon as hundreds of firefighters deployed to the area, the regional administration said Friday.

Firefighters were tackling multiple fires in central England on Thursday after the U.K. recorded its hottest day of the year as an intense stretch of hot weather continued to grip Europe.

The wildfires across the West Midlands, which saw several houses burned to the ground, have been "one of the most significant" incidents the region's fire service has ever dealt with, chief fire officer Simon Tuhill said.

A cloud of dust billows behind Maarten Janse's tractor as he spreads a mixture of compost, straw and manure over a field to nourish the parched soil.

Janse's farm on the fertile land of the Netherlands' southwestern Zeeland Province is drying out despite his efforts to make it more drought resistant as accelerated human-caused global warming and a supersized El Nino batter fields across Europe.

Large parts of western Europe were sweltering once again on Thursday, with Britain and France entering their fifth heat waves of an exceptional summer that's threatening to break even more records.

Forecasters in the U.K. are predicting the mercury will rise as high as 38 Celsius (100 Fahrenheit) in central and southeast England, potentially making it the hottest day of the year. The highest temperature this year was recorded on June 26 when the temperature hit 38 C in eastern England.