An avalanche on Mont Blanc swept two skiers to their deaths and left another injured, while a hiker was killed on another slope in the French Alps, according to local authorities.

The avalanche Thursday swept through an off-piste area of the Saint-Gervais-les-Bains ski resort at an altitude of 2,300 meters (7,545 feet), the administration for the Haute-Savoie region said in a statement.

As the deadliest year this century for forest fires comes to a close, attention is turning to how to prevent such infernos happening again.

In 2023 forest fires destroyed nearly 400 million hectares (988 million acres) of land around the world, killed more than 250 people and emitted 6.5 billion tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

An oil spill is sloshing tarry ooze onto beaches in the state of Carabobo along Venezuela's western coastline, several environmental groups said on Wednesday.

The spill was first detected on Tuesday, Yohan Flores, a regional director of the Azul Ambientalistas NGO, told AFP.

In northeast Colombia, police guard warehouses stacked high with confiscated timber with a noble new destiny: transformation into homes for bees beleaguered by pesticides and climate change.

Led by new solar power, the world added renewable energy at breakneck speed in 2023, a trend that if amplified will help Earth turn away from fossil fuels and prevent severe warming and its effects.

Norway's largest pension fund said Thursday it has divested from Saudi Aramco due to the oil giant's lack of climate action and from 11 other Gulf companies over human rights concerns.

KLP, which manages over 700 billion kroner ($70 billion), said the exclusion amounted to $15 million.

From an ice storm in North Dakota that sealed windows shut to blizzard conditions in Colorado causing hundreds of airport delays and cancellations, a winter storm pummeled much of the central United States on Tuesday, the day after Christmas.

"The heavy snow conditions in the Plains should be slowly alleviating today, but it'll be very slow," said Weather Prediction Center forecaster David Roth. "Even when the snow ends, the high winds should keep visibility near zero — whiteout conditions — for a decent part of today."

Rescue teams resumed the search for bodies Tuesday after flash floods hit a South African town killing six people with 10 missing, officials said.

Firefighters and volunteers worked to reinforce dikes against rising floodwaters in northern and eastern Germany as heavy rains falling on already soaked ground pushed rivers and streams over their banks and forced several towns to evacuate residents.

The city of Braunschweig in Lower Saxony deployed an artificial dike — a long tube filled with water from the rising river — to protect its downtown area, while several hundred residents of Windehausen in the Thuringia region were told to leave their homes as the town lost power, the dpa news agency reported.

Beijing recorded the most hours of sub-freezing temperatures in December in more than seven decades as a cold wave has enveloped northern and central swathes of China, bringing snowstorms and record-breaking temperatures.

A weather observatory in the Chinese capital as of Sunday had recorded more than 300 hours of sub-freezing temperatures since Dec. 11 – the most since records began, in 1951, according to the official newspaper Beijing Daily.