A powerful storm barreled toward Southern California after flooding highways, toppling trees and causing mud flows in areas burned bare by recent fires across the northern part of the state.

Drenching showers and strong winds accompanied the weekend's arrival of an atmospheric river — a long and wide plume of moisture pulled in from the Pacific Ocean. The National Weather Service's Sacramento office warned of "potentially historic rain."

The Canadian coast guard has evacuated 16 people from a burning container ship that is expelling toxic gas off Canada's Pacific coast, but there is "no safety risk" to those on shore, authorities said Sunday.

Top crude exporter Saudi Arabia will aim to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2060, its de facto ruler said on Saturday, days before the COP26 global climate summit.

He feels like a man who has drowned.

The worst flooding that parts of South Sudan have seen in 60 years now surrounds his home of mud and grass. His field of sorghum, which fed his family, is under water. Surrounding mud dykes have collapsed.

The Earth's warming and resulting natural disasters are creating a more dangerous world of desperate leaders and peoples, the Biden administration said in the federal government's starkest assessments yet of security and migration challenges facing the United States as the climate worsens.

The Defense Department for years has called climate change a threat to U.S. national security. But Thursday's reports by the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, National Security Council and Director of National Intelligence provide one of the government's deepest looks yet at the vast rippling effects on the world's stability and resulting heightened threats to U.S. security, as well as its impact on migration.

The 2-month-old California wildfire that threatened the Lake Tahoe resort region over the summer has been declared 100% contained, officials said.

The fire, which scorched more than 346 square miles (896 square kilometers) of the Sierra Nevada and burned hundreds of homes, reached the milestone late Wednesday, according to a report from firefighting officials.

A hefty set of tusks is usually an advantage for elephants, allowing them to dig for water, strip bark for food and joust with other elephants. But during episodes of intense ivory poaching, those big incisors become a liability.

Now researchers have pinpointed how years of civil war and poaching in Mozambique have led to a greater proportion of elephants that will never develop tusks.

Scientists attempting to bring back the near-extinct northern white rhinoceros announced Thursday they would stop harvesting eggs from one of two remaining live specimens involved in an unprecedented breeding program.

French oil and gas major Total deliberately downplayed the threat of global warming from the 1970s onwards, according to research based on interviews with former company executives and internal company documents.

The death toll from days of flooding and landslides in India and Nepal crossed 100 on Wednesday, including several families swept away or crushed in their homes by avalanches of mud and rocks.