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.

Navigating her boat toward a wooden platform floating in an idyllic New Hampshire lake where "On Golden Pond" was filmed, biologist Tiffany Grade spotted what she had feared.

An olive brown loon's egg with black speckles was sitting on an nest, abandoned by its parents and with no chance to hatch. Gently scooping it up with gloved hands, Grade placed the egg in a zip lock bag and packed it into a cooler.

Workers, volunteers and members of the National Guard fanned out in areas of Kentucky slammed by a series of tornadoes to begin the long process of recovery, including replacing thousands of damaged utility poles, delivering bottles of drinking water and continuing to search for the dead.

The tornado outbreak Friday that killed at least 88 people in five states — 74 of them in Kentucky — cut a path of devastation that stretched from Arkansas, where a nursing home was destroyed, to Illinois, where an Amazon distribution center was heavily damaged.

Indonesia lifted a tsunami alert Tuesday following a magnitude 7.3 undersea earthquake that struck off Flores Island, triggering panic in a region prone to fatal quakes but apparently causing no major damage or casualties.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quake hit at a depth of 18.5 kilometers (11.5 miles) under the sea, and was located 112 kilometers (74 miles) north of the town of Maumere, the second-largest on the island in East Nusa Tenggara province with a population of 85,000.

China and U.S. had a "very good year" for collaboration on dealing with climate change, but Washington is still pushing Beijing to adopt more ambitious carbon reduction goals, the top U.S. diplomat in China said.

David Meale, the American Embassy's No. 2 official, said that what China does on burning coal will be crucial to whether the world can meet its target of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, as set by the 2015 Paris climate accord.

The German government on Monday approved 60 billion euros ($68 billion) in funding to be used for combating climate change and modernizing the country, a move that the new finance minister described as a "booster" for Europe's biggest economy.

The supplementary budget approved by Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Cabinet entails putting the money into a government fund that is being redesigned as a "climate and transformation fund." It will be used to finance projects aimed at fighting climate change and improving Germany's infrastructure.

The Western U.S. is bracing for the brunt of a major winter storm expected to hit Monday, bringing travel headaches, the threat of localized flooding and some relief in an abnormally warm fall.

Light rain and snow fell in Northern California on Sunday, giving residents a taste of what's to come. The multiday storm could drop more than 8 feet (2.4 meters) of snow on the highest peaks and drench other parts of California as it pushes south and east before moving out midweek.

Rescuers were forced to crawl over the dead to get to the living at a Kentucky candle factory walloped by a tornado, part of an unusual cluster that killed dozens in the Midwest and South and flattened whole towns.

By the time churchgoers gathered Sunday morning to pray for the lost, more than 24 hours had elapsed since anyone had been found alive. Instead, crews recovered pieces of peoples' lives — a backpack, a pair of shoes and a cellphone with 27 missed messages were among the items. Still, a definitive death toll remained elusive, though it was expected to be lower than initially feared.