For the second straight year, the world heads into a new La Nina weather event. This would tend to dry out parts of an already parched and fiery American West and boost an already busy Atlantic hurricane season.

Just five months after the end of a La Nina that started in September 2020, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a new cooling of the Pacific is underway.

Hong Kong suspended classes, stock market trading and government services as a typhoon passed south of the city Wednesday.

Heavy rain from Typhoon Kompasu could flood low-lying areas and residents should take precautions, the Hong Kong Observatory said.

Hundreds of people on La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands awoke on Wednesday fearing for their homes and property after a new lava stream from an erupting volcano threatened to engulf another neighborhood on its way toward the Atlantic Ocean.

Island authorities ordered the evacuation of around 800 people from a section of the coastal town of Los Llanos de Aridane on Tuesday after the lava took a new course and put their homes in its probable path of destruction.

Tropical Storm Pamela is picking up momentum in the Pacific off Mexico and forecasters say it should be back to hurricane strength again before striking the coast north of the port of Mazatlan on Wednesday.

After weakening to a tropical storm Tuesday afternoon, Pamela was centered about 170 miles (275 kilometers) west-southwest of Mazatlan late Tuesday and was moving north-northeast at about 12 mph (19 kph), the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. The storm had maximum winds of about 70 mph (110 kph).

A strong earthquake jolted the Greek island of Crete on Tuesday, two weeks and a day after another temblor killed a man and damaged hundreds of buildings.

The Geodynamic Institute in Athens said the undersea earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 6.3 and occurred at 12:24 p.m. local time (9:24 a.m. GMT) off the island's eastern coast.

Hurricane Ida swept through Louisiana with furious winds that ripped roofs off buildings and storm surge so powerful it moved homes. What it wrought on the living it also wrought on the dead, moving vaults and caskets and adding another layer of trauma for families and communities recovering from the powerful storm.

"Once you bury a relative, you expect that to be the permanent resting place," said the Rev. Haywood Johnson Jr., who lives in the small community of Ironton, south of New Orleans along the Mississippi River. Ida's surge destroyed nearly every home in the community and pushed heavy vaults — including those containing Johnson's mother and other relatives — from their resting spots into the streets.

China on Tuesday pledged about $230 million to establish a fund to protect biodiversity in developing countries.

President Xi Jinping, speaking by video to a U.N. conference in the southwest Chinese city of Kunming, said that China would put in 1.5 billion yuan and called on other countries to contribute to the Kunming Biodiversity Fund.

A climate change conference will underscore to policymakers in the Middle East and the east Mediterranean that the switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is needed urgently because greenhouse gas emissions are helping to drive up regional temperatures faster than in many other inhabited parts of the world.

George Zittis, a scientist at the Cyprus Institute's Climate and Atmosphere Research Center, said that although this "can't happen overnight" because of the region's heavy dependency on fossil fuels for energy production, governments have to make the switch within the next two decades to avert potentially "irreversible effects" such as desertification.

Dozens of large German companies have urged the country's next government to put in place ambitious policies to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate accord.

The 69 companies said in an open letter Monday that the next government needs to put Germany "on a clear and reliable path to climate neutrality" with a plan for doing so within its first 100 days in office.

Hundreds of protesters from climate activist group Extinction Rebellion blocked a busy intersection Monday near the temporary home of the Netherlands' parliament, marking the start of a week of protests the group plans in The Hague before a U.N. climate conference that opens on Oct. 31.

The demonstration started when protesters wheeled a yellow boat emblazoned with the Dutch words meaning "citizens decide" into the middle the road. Other activists walked to another nearby intersection and began sitting or lying down in the road as police looked on.