For centuries, French and Italian mountain communities on the flanks of Western Europe's highest peak have gazed upon seemingly eternal glaciers and snow that gave the colossus its name: Mont Blanc, the white mountain.

But climate warming is dismantling the picture at alarming speed.

Schools in the capital of Indonesia's South Sumatra province switched to remote learning Wednesday as worsening haze from forest and peatland fires pushed air pollution to unhealthy levels, adding to disruptions that have already affected more than 1.4 million students across the country, officials said.

Indonesia has been plagued by forest and land fires for decades but an intensifying El Nino pattern and a prolonged dry season made the impact of the fires especially dire this year. Toxic haze and smoke have spread far beyond Indonesia's borders in Southeast Asia, creating a regional health crisis.

The mountain section whose collapse triggered fatal floods in Nepal and China on August 26 had experienced unprecedented heat for the time of year, meteorological data analyzed by a researcher shows.

Average temperatures on the mountain glacier at an altitude of 5,200 meters (17,060 feet) were estimated at around five degrees Celsius between August 21 and 26.

The world's most endangered tigers have started a family in Greece, offering hope for a predator that is rapidly vanishing from the wild.

Three 2-month-old Sumatran tiger cubs received identification microchips and their first vaccinations Tuesday at a zoo near Athens, as part of a global effort to build a backup population.

Rescuers in Nepal pulled two workers alive from an underground tunnel at a hydropower plant Friday, raising hopes of reaching dozens of others believed to be trapped nine days after deadly floods swept away villages and submerged the Himalayan region in mud and debris.

Search teams first heard voices from inside the tunnel in the morning, allowing them to locate the two men, Nepalese lawmaker Shri Ram Neupane said. Images showed a rescuer carrying one of the workers, covered in mud, on his back, while soldiers on either side helped.

Malaysia declared an emergency Friday in a town in Sarawak state on Borneo Island after air pollution breached the country's emergency-level threshold linked to fires in neighboring Indonesia.

The Air Pollutant Index in Serian, a small agricultural town of just under 90,000 near the border of Indonesia's Kalimantan province, surged to 521 on Friday, according to Malaysia's environment department. Sarawak's much-larger capital, Kuching, also showed a hazardous reading of 311.

France recorded its hottest summer since measurements began more than a century ago, the environment minister said on Thursday.

Firefighters relentlessly tackled wildfires throughout the summer, even in normally cooler and wetter regions in the north and Brittany, as France experienced one of its driest years ever. A historic fire devoured forests near Bordeaux and forced a quarter of a million people to evacuate from their homes.

Belgium logged nearly 3,000 excess deaths during successive heatwaves since June, health authorities said Thursday, days after this summer was confirmed as the hottest on record in the northern European nation.

Some 365 excess deaths were observed between July 28 and August 16, as Belgium sweltered under a third heatwave, adding to the almost 2,600 excess deaths recorded during the previous two bouts of high temperatures, the Sciensano national public health institute said.

Britain's sweltering summer of successive heat waves was the hottest on record, the national weather service said Tuesday.

The season, marked by extreme heat, little rainfall, destructive wildfires and water restrictions, snapped the record set only a year earlier, the Met Office said, citing provisional data recorded since 1884.

When a wall of water, rocks and mud tore through her remote village in Nepal last week, Pema Tamang and her neighbors fled uphill to a Buddhist shrine that had been rebuilt the previous year after a 2015 earthquake.

The steep mountain folds of the Himalayas, already prone to earthquakes, have seen more frequent flash floods as high mountain glaciers melt, redrawing rivers at sometimes terrifying speed. Residents have had little time to rebuild from one disaster to the next, raising concerns over whether their communities can endure as climate change accelerates.