Wildfires in Hawaii fanned by strong winds burned multiple structures, forced evacuations and caused power outages in several communities late Tuesday as firefighters struggled to reach some areas that were cut off by downed trees and power lines.
The National Weather Service said Hurricane Dora, which was passing to the south of the island chain at a safe distance of 500 miles (805 kilometers), was partly to blame for gusts above 60 mph (97 kph) that knocked out power as night fell, rattled homes and grounded firefighting helicopters.

The Southwestern U.S. is bracing for another week of blistering temperatures, with forecasters on Monday extending an excessive heat warning through the weekend for Arizona's most populated area, and alerting residents in parts of Nevada and New Mexico to stay indoors.
The metro Phoenix area is on track to tie or to break a record set in the summer of 1974 for the most consecutive days with the high temperature at or above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 Celsius). Even the morning low temperatures are tying historic records.

French authorities say 11 people are missing after a fire broke out early on Wednesday in a holiday home for people with disabilities in eastern France while 17 others have been evacuated.
Interior minister Gerald Darmanin tweeted that "early this morning, a fire broke out in a facility for disabled people" in the small town of Wintzenheim, close to the border with Germany. "Despite the rapid and courageous intervention of the fire department ... several casualties are reported," he said. Rescue operations were still ongoing.

Bahrain prison inmates are taking part in a hunger strike over conditions there, activists and authorities said Wednesday, the latest sign of simmering unrest in the island kingdom a decade after the Arab Spring.
The strike targets the Jaw Rehabilitation and Reform Center, a facility holding many of the prisoners identified by human rights activists as dissidents who oppose the rule of the Al Khalifa family. The country's Sunni rulers long have faced complaints from the island's Shiite majority of discrimination.

The United States and its allies vowed Tuesday to keep Syria's failure to account for its chemical weapons program in the spotlight at the U.N. Security Council every month despite opposition from Russia and China.
U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the council Syrian President Bashar Assad's government "has repeatedly lied to the international community" and to investigators from the international chemical weapons watchdog, which has confirmed that it used these banned weapons on at least nine occasions.

Rains and winds were growing in southern South Korea Wednesday as a tropical storm drew closer to the Korean Peninsula, where it was forecast to slam into major urban areas.
Dozens of flights and ferry services were grounded and tens of thousands of fishing vessels evacuated to ports as government officials raised concern about potentially huge damages from flooding, landslides and tidal waves triggered by the typhoon-strength winds.

Eight Amazon nations called on industrialized countries to do more to help preserve the world's largest rainforest as they met at a major summit in Brazil to chart a common course on how to combat climate change.
The leaders of South American nations that are home to the Amazon, meeting at a two-day summit in the city of Belem that ends Wednesday, said the task of stopping the destruction of the rainforest can't fall to just a few when the crisis has been caused by so many.

Scientists are wondering if global warming and El Nino have an accomplice in fueling this summer's record-shattering heat.
The European climate agency Copernicus reported that July was one-third of a degree Celsius (six-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) hotter than the old record. That's a bump in heat that is so recent and so big, especially in the oceans and even more so in the North Atlantic, that scientists are split on whether something else could be at work.

Nagasaki marked the 78th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of the city Wednesday with the mayor urging world powers to abolish nuclear weapons, saying nuclear deterrence also increases risks of nuclear war.
Shiro Suzuki made the remark after the Group of Seven industrial powers adopted a separate document on nuclear disarmament in May that called for using nuclear weapons as deterrence.

Russian air defenses shot down two drones aimed at Moscow overnight, officials said Wednesday, in what they described as Ukraine's latest attempt to strike the Russian capital in an apparent campaign to unnerve Muscovites and take the war to Russia.
The drones were intercepted on their approach to Moscow and there were no casualties, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. The Russian Defense Ministry described it as a "terrorist attack."
