Indonesia on Monday intensified ground and aerial firefighting operations as huge blazes in central and western parts of the country scorched thousands of hectares of forests and peatland, created a choking haze that blanketed cities and crossed borders.

Indonesian authorities have been battling fires driven by an intensifying El Nino pattern and a prolonged dry season, generating dense smoke that crossed into Malaysia and Brunei, according to Indonesia's National Disaster Management Agency, or BNPB.

Champagne producers are racing to pick their grapes as the region's earliest harvest on record gets underway, after extreme heat and drought accelerated ripening, leaving growers a narrow window to preserve the quality of the region's world-famous sparkling wine.

On the hillsides of Hautvillers, teams of grape pickers start work at 6:30 a.m. among rows of vines that were recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2015.

Communities still recovering from last weekend's hurricane in Hawaii could get pounded again in coming days from another tropical system gaining strength over warm Pacific waters.

Hurricane Lala tore roofs off houses, uprooted trees, covered roads in mud and rocks and left many households without electricity. With thousands of homes and businesses still in the dark Thursday, forecasters warned yet another tropical cyclone is likely to approach the islands soon.

Indonesia n authorities warned Friday they would take legal action against anyone who starts an open fire, as huge blazes on Borneo and elsewhere created a choking haze that blanketed cities and dense smoke drifted into neighboring Malaysia.

The fires are concentrated on Borneo, the world's third-largest island shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. Indonesia occupies about three-quarters of the island, where more than 5,000 hot spots were recorded by the country's Forestry Ministry.

A woman died and at least two other people were injured as severe storms caused extensive damage overnight across parts of Germany. Further southeast, in the Balkans, firefighters continued to battle wildfires that have been raging across Europe all summer.

In Waldorf, in the southwestern state of Rhineland-Palatinate, a woman was struck by a falling tree and fatally injured, the German news agency dpa reported Thursday. Another woman suffered serious injuries in the accident, police said.

When it's really hot out, getting dressed seems pretty simple: Wear something light, loose and made for summer.

But textile researchers say it's actually a little more complicated than that.

Hundreds of commercial flights will be told to change their paths over the northeastern Atlantic Ocean during the next two winters to show how minor altitude adjustments can reduce aviation's climate impact.

The British government is backing the landmark airspace-scale trial, launched Tuesday, to avoid creating condensation trails, or contrails. Google UK is contributing its artificial intelligence-powered forecasts to identify the contrail regions.

An unstable mountain rock formation looming above the Swiss village of Kandersteg threatens a landslide that could rival the disaster that destroyed nearby Blatten last year, a collapse scientists linked to thawing permafrost and glacier dynamics.

The 1,300 residents of Kandersteg, in Switzerland's Bern canton, live amid a quintessential Alpine landscape of sharp peaks, white glaciers, steep green valleys and the distant sound of cowbells.

Firefighters were making a potentially decisive push on Tuesday to encircle the massive wildfire burning in Belgium's High Fens nature reserve, despite unfavorable weather hampering air support operations, authorities said.

"We are trying to definitively encircle the fire today," regional government spokesperson Nicolas Yernaux told AFP, saying all focus was on "reinforcing our eastern defenses" with the arrival of "sustained winds" blowing towards the German border a stone's throw away.

One of Belgium's biggest ever wildfires blazed out of control Monday even as cooler weather and rain eased conditions for firefighters, while in Greece a fire briefly flared up near the main airport on the outskirts of Athens.

Europe is sweltering through one of its hottest and driest summers on record, which a recent study said was fueled by climate change.