Hurricane Ian left a path of destruction in southwest Florida, trapping people in flooded homes, damaging the roof of a hospital intensive care unit and knocking out power to 2 million people before aiming for the Atlantic Coast.

One of the strongest hurricanes to ever hit the United States barreled across the Florida peninsula overnight Wednesday, threatening catastrophic flooding inland, the National Hurricane Center warned.

Hurricane Ian tore into western Cuba on Tuesday as a major hurricane, with nothing to stop it from intensifying into a catastrophic Category 4 storm before it hits Florida on Wednesday.

Ian made landfall at 4:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday in Cuba's Pinar del Rio province, where officials set up 55 shelters, evacuated 50,000 people, rushed in emergency personnel and took steps to protect crops in Cuba's main tobacco-growing region.

The Asian Development Bank said Tuesday it will devote at least $14 billion through 2025 to help ease a worsening food crisis in the Asia-Pacific.

The development lender said it plans a comprehensive program of support to help the 1.1 billion people in the region who lack healthy diets due to poverty and soaring food prices.

Vietnam imposed a curfew and evacuated over 800,000 people as a powerful typhoon that had flooded villages and left at least eight dead in the Philippines aimed Tuesday for the country's central region.

People living near the coast where Typhoon Noru was expected to slam early Wednesday had been ordered to take shelter, national television VTV said. Schools were closed and public events canceled.

Germany lost one of its few remaining glaciers this summer as exceedingly warm weather ate away Alpine ice at a faster pace than feared, a scientific report released on Monday showed.

While world leaders from wealthy countries acknowledge the "existential threat" of climate change, Tuvalu Prime Minister Kausea Natano is racing to save his tiny island nation from drowning by raising it 13 to 16 feet (4 to 5 meters) above sea level through land reclamation.

While experts issue warnings about the eventual uninhabitability of the Marshall Islands, President David Kabua must reconcile the inequity of a seawall built to protect one house that is now flooding another one next door.

Eight-year-old Jerifa Islam only remembers the river being angry, its waters gnawing away her family's farmland and waves lashing their home during rainy season flooding. Then one day in July of 2019, the mighty Brahmaputra River swallowed everything.

Her home in the Darrang district of India's Assam state was washed away. But the calamity started Jerifa and her brother, Raju 12, on a path that eventually led them to schools nearly 2,000 miles (3,218 kilometers) away in Bengaluru, where people speak the Kannada language that is so different from the children's native Bangla.

A powerful earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.8 struck Mexico early Thursday, causing buildings to sway and leaving at least one person dead in the nation's capital.

The earthquake struck early Thursday shortly after 1 a.m., just three days after a 7.6-magnitude earthquake shook western and central Mexico, killing two.

Prince William on Wednesday hailed his late grandmother's passion for the environment as he called for the "fastest change the world has ever known" in transitioning to sustainable energy sources. 

A tropical storm that dumped heavy rain as it cut across Japan moved into the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday after killing two and injuring more than 100, paralyzing traffic and leaving thousands of homes without power.

New damage was reported in southern Japan, where Typhoon Nanmadol hit over the weekend before weakening as it moved north.