Used to shrugging off the heat, Las Vegas residents are now eyeing the thermometer as the desert city is on track Wednesday to set a record for the most consecutive days over 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46.1 Celsius) amid a lingering hot spell that will continue scorching much of the U.S. into the weekend.

On Tuesday, Las Vegas flirted again with the all-time temperature record of 120 F (48.8 C) reached on Sunday, but settled for a new daily mark of 119 F (48.3 C) that smashed the old one of 116 F (46.6 C) set for the date in 2021. Forecasters say the city will likely hit a record fifth straight day above 115 F (46.1 C) on Wednesday.

The return of searing heat in the Houston area has deepened the misery for people still without power after Hurricane Beryl left residents in search of places to cool off and fuel up as the extended outages strained one of the nation's largest cities.

More than 1.7 million homes and businesses in Texas lacked electricity Wednesday morning, down from a peak of over 2.7 million on Monday, according to PowerOutage.us. State officials faced questions over whether the power utility that covers much of the area had sufficiently prepared.

Earth's more than year-long streak of record-shattering hot months kept on simmering through June, according to the European climate service Copernicus.

There's hope that the planet will soon see an end to the record-setting part of the heat streak, but not the climate chaos that has come with it, scientists said.

Deforestation in Colombia fell 36% in 2023 versus the previous year, the government said, marking the lowest level since records began.

The decline was driven by a drop in environmental destruction in the Amazon, the world's largest rainforest, including about one-third of it in Colombia, the government of leftist President Gustavo Petro said.

Hundreds of Europeans touring the American West and adventurers from around the U.S. are still being drawn to Death Valley National Park, even though the desolate region known as one of the Earth's hottest places is being punished by a dangerous heat wave blamed for a motorcyclist's death over the weekend.

French, Spanish, English and Swiss tourists left their air-conditioned rental cars and motorhomes Monday to take photographs of the barren landscape so different than the snow-capped mountains and rolling green hills they know back home. American adventurers liked the novelty of it, even as officials at the park in California warned visitors to stay safe.

Rescue workers dug through tons of mud and rubble on Tuesday as they searched for dozens of missing people after a landslide hit an unauthorized gold mining area on Indonesia's Sulawesi island, killing at least 23 people.

More than 100 villagers were digging for grains of gold on Sunday in the remote and hilly village of Bone Bolango when tons of mud plunged down the surrounding hills and buried their makeshift camps, said Heriyanto, head of the provincial Search and Rescue Office.

Stung by past failures to prepare for hurricanes, the Mexican government on Wednesday began evacuating even sea turtle eggs from beaches ahead of Hurricane Beryl.

While Beryl remains far offshore in the Caribbean near Jamaica, it is expected to hit somewhere south of Cancun by late Thursday or early Friday.

Around 134 million people in the U.S. are under alerts as an "extremely dangerous and record-breaking" heat wave broils much of the country, according to the National Weather Service.

Months of scorching temperatures sometimes over 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) in parts of India this year — its worst heat wave in over a decade — left hundreds dead or ill. But the official number of deaths listed in government reports barely scratches the surface of the true toll and that's affecting future preparations for similar swelters, according to public health experts.

India now has a bit of respite from the intense heat, and a different set of extreme weather problems as monsoon rain lashes the northeast, but for months the extreme heat took a toll on large swaths of the country, particularly in northern India, where government officials reported at least 110 heat-related deaths.

It's as if the sky opened up and dropped everything it had in a matter of minutes. Giant raindrops combined with hail to transform an otherwise toasty summer day into a white wintry scene, at least for a few minutes.

Then it all turned to red mud.