The latest in a series of wet winter storms gained strength in California early Monday, with forecasters warning of possible flooding, hail, strong winds and even brief tornadoes as the system moves south over the next few days.

Gusts topped 30 mph (48 kph) in Oakland and San Jose as a mild cold front late Saturday gave way to a more powerful storm on Sunday, said meteorologist Brayden Murdock with the National Weather Service office in San Francisco.

A landslide triggered by heavy rain and snowfall buried more than two dozen houses in a remote village in eastern Afghanistan, killing at least five people and leaving more than 20 others missing, a provincial official said Monday.

The landslide, which occurred Sunday night, destroyed or damaged more than two dozen houses in Noorgram district, according to Samiulhaq Haqbayan, the Taliban-appointed director of information and culture in Nuristan province.

Ecological activist Greta Thunberg Sunday joined a protest in the south-west of France against eight planned oil wells, which in theory will be banned in the country by 2040.

The "Stop Petrole Bassin d'Arcachon" group, which opposes oil drilling in the area around the seaside resort of Arcachon, claimed 3,000 showed up for the protest, but police said there were 1,200.

Following the U.N.'s COP28 climate talks in oil-fueled Dubai, the COP29 conference is headed for the historic cradle of oil, Azerbaijan, which is in the midst of a gas boom.

The former Soviet republic of 10 million people brimming with hydrocarbons is on track to increase its gas production by 35 percent in the next 10 years, contrary to efforts to contain global warming.

The death toll from a massive landslide that hit a gold-mining village in the southern Philippines has risen to 54 with 63 people still missing, authorities said Sunday.

The landslide hit the mountain village of Masara in Davao de Oro province on Tuesday night after weeks of torrential rains.

Nearly half of the world's migratory species are in decline, according to a new United Nations report released Monday.

Many songbirds, sea turtles, whales, sharks and other migratory animals move to different environments with changing seasons and are imperiled by habitat loss, illegal hunting and fishing, pollution and climate change.

The Berlin Zoo is mourning Ingo the Flamingo, its oldest resident, who died at what is believed to be at least 75 years of age and had lived there since the mid-1950s.

His place of origin is unclear. The zoo announced Ingo's death at an "imposing" age in social media posts on Wednesday. It said that a ring on the bird's leg with the inscription "Cairo, 23.6.1948" indicated what is believed to have been "his minimum age."

A volcano in southwestern Iceland erupted for the third time since December on Thursday, sending jets of lava into the sky and triggering the evacuation of the Blue Lagoon spa, one of the island nation's biggest tourist attractions.

The eruption began at about 0600 GMT (1 a.m. EST) along a three-kilometer (nearly two-mile) fissure northeast of Mount Sundhnukur, the Icelandic Meteorological Office said. The site is about 4 kilometers (2½ miles) northeast of Grindavik, a coastal town of 3,800 people that was evacuated before a previous eruption on Dec. 18.

The number of monarch butterflies at their wintering areas in Mexico dropped by 59% this year to the second lowest level since record keeping began, experts said Wednesday, blaming heat, drought and loss of habitat.

The butterflies' migration from Canada and the United States to Mexico and back again is considered a marvel of nature. No single butterfly lives to complete the entire journey.

For the eighth straight month in January, Earth was record hot, according to the European climate agency. That was obvious in the northern United States, where about 1,000 people were golfing last month in a snow-starved Minneapolis during what the state is calling "the Lost Winter of 2023-24."

For the first time, the global temperature pushed past the internationally agreed upon warming threshold for an entire 12-month period, with February 2023 to January 2024 running 2.74 degrees Fahrenheit (1.52 degrees Celsius) hotter than pre-industrial levels, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service of the European Space Agency. That's the highest 12-month global temperature average on record, Copernicus reported.