Residents of Vanuatu were hunkering down Wednesday as a cyclone barreled through the Pacific island nation.

Authorities said that there were power outages in some areas and many fallen trees and branches, but it was too early to assess the extent of the damage with Cyclone Judy still raging. They said there were no initial reports of major destruction or deaths.

Parts of the Northeast are gearing up for what could be very heavy snow Tuesday, after tornadoes and other powerful winds swept through parts of the Southern Plains and the Midwest, killing at least one person in Oklahoma, and some Michigan residents faced a sixth consecutive day without power following last week's ice storm.

In California, the National Weather Service said winter storms will continue moving into the state through Wednesday.

Ever bigger cars pose a growing problem for the environment because they produce more greenhouse gas emissions and need larger batteries than their smaller cousins, according to the International Energy Agency.

The Paris-based body suggested Monday that it's time for the car industry to downsize its vehicles, citing data that showed the world's 330 million sports utility vehicles, or SUVs, pumped out almost 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022.

What used to be a rare one-two punch of consecutive hurricanes hitting about the same place in the United States weeks apart seems to be happening more often, and a new study says climate change will make back-to-back storms more frequent and nastier in the future.

Using computer simulations, scientists at Princeton University calculate that the deadly storm duet that used to happen once every few decades could happen every two or three years as the world warms from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, according to a study in Monday's Nature Climate Change.

Mabu saunters across a grassy field and raises his long, gray trunk to wrangle food from a hole carved inside a large boulder, captivating the attention of a girl propped up on her father's shoulders.

At this zoo in a central California farming community, the 32-year-old African elephant is key not only to drawing visitors but also to ensuring there are elephants for zoogoers to see in the years to come — a future some animal lovers want to avoid.

Iran's only Asiatic cheetah cub died Tuesday despite days of treatment for kidney failure, local media reported.

Pirouz, 10 months old, had been the only survivor of his litter of three endangered Asiatic cheetahs. He was the subject of widespread discussion online. The semiofficial Tasnim News Agency reported Tuesday that days of treatment had failed to save him.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday stressed the importance of legal challenges against "climate-wrecking corporations" like fossil-fuel producers, ratcheting up his call for the fight against climate change—- this time before the U.N.'s top human rights body.

Guterres opened the latest session of the Human Rights Council, part of an address that decried summary executions, torture and sexual violence in places like Ukraine; antisemitism, anti-Muslim bigotry and the persecution of Christians; inequality and threats to free expression, among other issues.

Some Michigan residents faced a fourth straight day without power Sunday as crews continued work to restore electricity more than 165,000 homes and businesses in the greater Detroit area following last week's ice storm.

Leah Thomas, whose home north of Detroit lost power Wednesday night, was still waiting Sunday afternoon for the power to come back.

Powerful storms with widespread wind gusts and reported tornadoes swept across Oklahoma and Kansas, leaving more than a dozen people injured, and some Michigan residents faced a fifth-straight day Monday without power following last week's ice storm.

In California, the National Weather Service said a series of winter storm systems will continue moving into the state through Wednesday after residents got a brief break from severe weather on Sunday.

Winter storms sowed more chaos across the U.S., shutting down much of Oregon's largest city with almost a foot of snow and paralyzing travel from parts of the Pacific Coast all the way to the northern Plains.

The nearly 11 inches (28 centimeters) that fell in Portland amounted to the second snowiest day in the city's history. It took drivers by surprise, stalling traffic during the Wednesday evening rush hour and trapping motorists on freeways for hours.