After recording the warmest monthly average temperature for any U.S. city ever in July, Phoenix climbed back up to dangerously high temperatures. That could mean trouble not just for people but for some plants, too.
Residents across the sprawling metro are finding the extended extreme heat has led to fried flora, and have shared photos and video of their damaged cacti with the Desert Botanical Garden. Nurseries and landscapers are inundated with requests for help with saguaros or fruit trees that are losing leaves.

China's capital has recorded its heaviest rainfall in at least 140 years over the past few days after being deluged with heavy rains from the remnants of Typhoon Doksuri.
The city recorded 744.8 millimeters (29.3 inches) of rain between Saturday and Wednesday morning, the Beijing Meteorological Bureau said Wednesday.

During Europe's heat wave last month, Floriana Peroni's vintage clothing store had to close for a week. A truck of rented generators blocked her door as they fed power to the central Roman neighborhood hit by a blackout as temperatures surged. The main culprit: air conditioning.
The period — in which temperatures hit 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) — coincided with peak electricity use that came close to Italy's all-time high, hitting a peak load of more than 59 gigawatts on July 19. That neared a July 2015 record.

A powerful typhoon slammed Okinawa and other islands in southwestern Japan Wednesday with high winds injuring more than 30 people as it moved west making its way toward mainland China.
The Japan Meteorological Agency said the typhoon is heading to the East China Sea, but may change course and head back to Japan later this week.

Human-caused global warming made July hotter for four out of five people on Earth, with more than 2 billion people feeling climate change-boosted warmth daily, according to a flash study.
More than 6.5 billion people, or 81% of the world's population, sweated through at least one day where climate change had a significant effect on the average daily temperature, according to a new report issued Wednesday by Climate Central, a science nonprofit that has figured a way to calculate how much climate change has affected daily weather.

There are now more golden lion tamarins bounding between branches in the Brazilian rainforest than at any time since efforts to save the species started in the 1970s, a new survey reveals.
Once on the brink of extinction, with only about 200 animals in the wild, the population has rebounded to around 4,800, according to a study released Tuesday by the Brazilian science and conservation nonprofit Golden Lion Tamarin Association.

Iran announced a nationwide two-day holiday because of increasing temperatures, state media reported Tuesday.
Government spokesperson Ali Bahadori Jahromi said the decision to close governmental offices, banks and schools on Wednesday and Thursday came after the health ministry warned about a possible increase in cases of heat exhaustion because of high temperatures in the country, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Jan Pappas and Ronald Yasuda hired a contractor to fasten the roof of their 1960s-era home to their walls with metal plates and nails so high winds of a potential hurricane wouldn't blow it away.
Their motivation? Global warming fueling natural disasters around the planet.

At about summer's halfway point, the record-breaking heat and weather extremes are both unprecedented and unsurprising, hellish yet boring in some ways, scientists say.
Killer heat. Deadly floods. Smoke from wildfires that chokes.

Crews battled "fire whirls" in California's Mojave National Preserve this weekend as a massive wildfire crossed into Nevada amid dangerously high temperatures and raging winds.
The York Fire was mapped at roughly 120 square miles (284 square kilometers) on Monday night, with no containment.
