Polish police on Thursday said they are investigating the deaths of four seals recently found dead on the Baltic coast around the port city of Gdynia.

Up to five trillion grocery bags are used each year and like most plastic garbage barely any is recycled, the UN said Tuesday as it warned the world was choking on trash.

Soot turned the white handkerchief around Abhash Kumar Sharma's face to black as the police officer tried to direct gridlocked traffic in the Indian city with the world's dirtiest air.

A sea of plastic spreads through the New Delhi slum of Taimur Nagar, a symbol of the grime and waste that makes the Indian capital one of the world's most polluted cities.

The plastic bottles, bags, food wrappers and other detritus have gushed out of a drain that ends in the shanty, leaving stinking sewer water clogging the roads.

When President Donald Trump announced the US exit from the Paris climate deal one year ago, the mayor of Philadelphia was among those who vowed to keep carrying the torch.

French champagne producers are counting their losses after a battering by a wave of hail storms that wiped out 1,000 hectares of grapes, the main growers' association said Wednesday.

Australia's Great Barrier Reef, under severe stress in a warmer, more acidic ocean, has returned from near-extinction five times in the past 30,000 years, researchers said Monday.

And while this suggests the reef may be more resilient than once thought, it has likely never faced an onslaught quite as severe as today, they added.

Subtropical Storm Alberto gained the early jump on the 2018 hurricane season as it headed toward anticipated landfall sometime Monday on the northern Gulf Coast, where white sandy beaches emptied of their usual Memorial Day crowds.

Though the Atlantic hurricane season doesn't officially start until Friday, Alberto has become the first named storm this year, throwing disarray into long holiday weekend plans up and down Florida's Gulf Coast. And just as Memorial Day marked summer's unofficial start in the U.S., Alberto gave it the unofficial start of what forecasters recently predicted would be an active hurricane season.

In a wooden canoe on the waters of the Mono River in southwest Benin, a strange cone-shaped effigy in purple raffia and topped with horns sails back and forth through the mangroves.

Cyclone Mekunu was downgraded to a tropical storm Saturday, a day after lashing the southern coast of Oman and killing at least two people, authorities said.