South Africa was under a declared state of national disaster on Thursday as the death toll from floods caused by severe rains in the Eastern Cape region rose to 92.

The Eastern Cape government honored the victims of last week's floods with a provincial Day of Mourning and a memorial service at King Sabatha Dalindyebo Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) College in Mthatha, one of the few schools whose infrastructure remained intact.

Rescue workers used rubber dinghies to evacuate people and deliver food and water Wednesday after floodwaters overwhelmed towns in southern China's Guangdong province.

About 30,000 people have been evacuated in Huaiji County after days of heavy rain, state broadcaster CCTV said.

Tropical storm Erick, bearing down on the southwestern coast of Mexico on the Pacific Ocean, strengthened into a hurricane Wednesday, the US National Hurricane Center said.

The hurricane is 255 kilometers (155 miles) from the town of Puerto Angel in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca and is packing maximum sustained winds of 120 kilometers an hour (75 mph), the meteorological center said.

U.S. officials proposed Monday to protect the pangolin, a small, nocturnal mammal covered in scales, under the Endangered Species Act.

The pangolin is "the most trafficked mammal in the world" in large part for its scales, used in traditional Chinese medicine, and meat, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Climate change has tripled the frequency of atmospheric wave events linked to extreme summer weather in the last 75 years and that may explain why long-range computer forecasts keep underestimating the surge in killer heat waves, droughts and floods, a new study says.

In the 1950s, Earth averaged about one extreme weather-inducing planetary wave event a summer, but now it is getting about three per summer, according to a study in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Planetary waves are connected to 2021's deadly and unprecedented Pacific Northwest heat wave, the 2010 Russian heatwave and Pakistan flooding and the 2003 killer European heatwave, the study said.

The death toll from weekend flooding in West Virginia rose to six as residents tried to clean up with the threat of more rain on the way.

At least two people remained missing in the state's northern panhandle after torrential downpours Saturday night, Gov. Patrick Morrisey said Monday. As much as 4 inches (10 centimeters) of rain fell in parts of Wheeling and Ohio County within 40 minutes. The dead included a 3-year-old child.

A fast-moving Hawaii brush fire fueled by fierce winds forced the evacuation of about 50 Maui residents on the opposite side of the same island where a devastating blaze killed over 100 people two years ago.

The fire started Sunday in a sparsely populated area with land set aside for Native Hawaiians.

Swiss authorities cleared a village in the country's east over a potential rockslide, three weeks after a mudslide submerged a vacated village in the southwest.

Residents of Brienz/Brinzauls, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) southwest of Davos, were being barred from entering the village because a rock mass on a plateau overhead has "accelerated so rapidly that it threatens to collapse," a statement from local officials said Monday.

Flash flooding caused by torrential rains killed five people in northern West Virginia and rescue crews were searching for three other people who were missing Sunday as authorities assessed damage to roads, bridges, natural gas lines and other infrastructure.

Officials said 2.5 to 4 inches (6 to 10 centimeters) of rain fell in parts of Wheeling and Ohio County within about a half hour on Saturday night.

Heavy rains in San Antonio rapidly flooded roads, swept away submerged cars and sent some people scrambling up trees to escape fast-rising waters Thursday while firefighters made dozens of rescues across the nation's seventh-largest city. At least five people died and two were still missing, authorities said.

The deaths all occurred in the northeast part of the city, where authorities found over a dozen vehicles in the water. More than a dozen smashed and overturned vehicles littered a creek after being tossed and carried by floodwaters.