To the naked eye, the Mako Compressor Station outside the dusty West Texas crossroads of Lenorah appears unremarkable, similar to tens of thousands of oil and gas operations scattered throughout the oil-rich Permian Basin.

What's not visible through the chain-link fence is the plume of invisible gas, primarily methane, billowing from the gleaming white storage tanks up into the cloudless blue sky.

A large wildfire on the German-Czech border is spreading and threatening to destroy a forested national park popular with tourists.

The fire in the region, called Bohemian Switzerland on the Czech side and the Saxon Switzerland national park on the German side, started last weekend. It had seemed to be under control but spread again early Thursday, German news agency dpa reported.

The world's most influential banks need to substantially accelerate climate efforts if global temperature rise is to be kept within the targets of the Paris Agreement, an assessment released Thursday by an institutional investors group warned.

The efforts of 27 giant banks in North America, Europe and Asia to align their policies with global warming of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) are falling far short in every area measured in the pilot study, obtained exclusively by The Associated Press. The report said no major bank has committed to end financing for new oil and gas exploration, and only one has promised to cut all coal financing in line with International Energy Agency guidelines.

Moroccan firefighters have stepped up their efforts to contain forest fires, fanned by fierce winds, that are sweeping across the north of the country, according to local authorities.

In the most affected province of Larache, south of Tangier, intervention teams supported by the army were attempting to keep in check fires that were still active and threatening villages, local sources told AFP on Wednesday night.

At least six people were killed in floods near Tehran Thursday, most in a landslide that dumped mud four meters deep in a village west of the capital, emergency services said.

The flash flooding near the capital, in the foothills of the Alborz mountains, comes less than a week after floods in the normally arid south of Iran left 22 people dead.

Shazad Akbar carried his four-year-old daughter on his shoulders Tuesday as he and his wife waded through knee-high water flooding a street in Surjani, a poor part of Pakistan's port city of Karachi.

A futuristic Saudi megacity is to feature two skyscrapers extending across a swathe of desert and mountain terrain, according to the latest disclosures on the project by the kingdom's de facto ruler.

France is on track to experience its driest July on record, the national weather service said Wednesday, with drought-like conditions leading to increasingly severe water restrictions around the country.

In 1998, as nations around the world agreed to cut carbon emissions through the Kyoto Protocol, America's fossil fuel companies plotted their response, including an aggressive strategy to inject doubt into the public debate.

"Victory," according to the American Petroleum Institute's memo, "will be achieved when average citizens 'understand' (recognize) uncertainties in climate science... Unless 'climate change' becomes a non-issue... there may be no moment when we can declare victory."

Firefighters were battling California's largest wildfire of the summer on Monday, a blaze near famed Yosemite National Park that has forced thousands of people to evacuate, officials said.