A two-tonne rubber whale can take on a life of its own in the frigid shallows of a windswept New Zealand beach, particularly when a bedraggled group of would-be rescuers is trying to wrestle it into a harness.

"Keep the blowhole clear... you're too close to the tail, one swipe can do a serious injury to yourself and the whale," an instructor yells as the Wellington rain lashes his pupils.

Conservationists in Bangladesh have released 10 tortoises into a remote forest as they attempt to revive the critically endangered species in a region wracked by deforestation and poaching.

Once abundant across the country's dense tropical forests, Asian Giant Tortoises had all but disappeared from the lush Chittagong hills.

Stormy weather has prompted Egyptian authorities to suspend classes Monday in the capital of Cairo and a handful of other provinces as a precautionary measure.

Authorities also closed the ports in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and the Suez Canal cities of Port Said and Suez.

The death toll following the strongest typhoon to batter the Philippines this year has risen to more than 200, with 52 other people still missing and several central towns and provinces grappling with downed communications and power outages and pleading for food and water, officials said Monday.

At its strongest, the typhoon packed sustained winds of 195 kilometers (121 miles) per hour and gusts of up to 270 kph (168 mph) before it blew out Friday into the South China Sea.

Eleven people including two foreigners died Friday in flash floods which swept through northern Iraq after torrential rains in Arbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdistan region, an official said.

In a country dealing with severe drought, many were caught by surprise as powerful storm waters started surging into their homes before dawn.

A Kentucky neighborhood ravaged by a tornado by got more bad news Thursday: the body of a missing teenager was found.

Nyssa Brown was the seventh member of her family to die in the tornado that hit Bowling Green last week. Warren County coroner Kevin Kirby said the 13-year-old's body was found Thursday morning in a wooded area near her subdivision.

A powerful storm system swept across the Great Plains and Midwest Wednesday, closing highways in western Kansas, spawning reported tornadoes in Nebraska and Iowa and raising concerns about fires because of unusually high temperatures.

The strong winds whipped up dust that reduced visibility to zero west of Wakeeney, Kansas, the state Department of Transportation said, and caused at least four semitrailers to blow over. Kansas officials closed Interstate 70 from the Colorado border to Salina, as well as all state highways in nine counties in northwest Kansas.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday pledged to do "whatever it takes, as long as it takes" to help Kentucky and other states after a series of deadly tornadoes that he said left a trail of unimaginable devastation. "You will recover and rebuild," he said.

"The scope and scale of this destruction is almost beyond belief," he said as he stood before a home reduced to a few walls and piles of rubble in Dawson Springs, one of two Kentucky towns he visited.

A powerful typhoon slammed into the southeastern Philippines on Thursday, toppling trees, ripping tin roofs and knocking down power as it blew across island provinces where nearly 100,000 people have been evacuated.

Coast guard personnel were rescuing residents stranded by chest-deep waters in a southern province, where pounding rains swamped villages in brownish water. In southern Cagayan de Oro city, footage showed two rescuers struggling to keep a month-old baby inside a laundry basin above the waters and shielded from the wind and rain with an umbrella.

The Arctic continues to deteriorate from global warming, not setting as many records this year as in the past, but still changing so rapidly that federal scientists call it alarming in their annual Arctic report card.

The 16th straight health check for the northern polar region spotlighted the first ever rainfall at Greenland summit station, record warm temperatures between October and December 2020, and the new problem of expansion of beavers in the Arctic.