Bhavani Mani Muthuvel and her family of nine have around five 20-liter (5-gallon) buckets worth of water for the week for cooking, cleaning and household chores.

"From taking showers to using toilets and washing clothes, we are taking turns to do everything," she said. It's the only water they can afford.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Monday that his country is ready to work with New Zealand to deepen trade and economic ties and address climate change.

Wang met his New Zealand counterpart, Winston Peters, at the start of a tour that will also include Australia.

This winter's record warmth provided the key ingredient for a Midwest outbreak of deadly tornadoes and damaging gorilla hail that hit parts of the Midwest Wednesday and Thursday, tornado experts said.

At least three people were killed in Thursday's tornado outbreak in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Arkansas, which came a day after large hail struck Kansas. It's a bit early, but not unprecedented, for such a tornado outbreak usually associated with May or April, but that's also because of the hottest winter in both U.S. and global records, meteorologists said.

South Sudan is closing all schools starting Monday in preparation for an extreme heat wave expected to last two weeks.

The health and education ministries advised parents to keep all children indoors as temperatures are expected to soar to 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit).

officially, at least.

The vernal equinox arrives on Tuesday, marking the start of the spring season for the Northern Hemisphere.

Irene Leonor Flores de Callata, 68, treks along a bone-dry riverbed, guiding a herd of llamas and sheep through stretching desert.

Flores de Callata's native Kolla people have spent centuries climbing deep into the mountains of northern Argentina in search of a simple substance: Fresh drinking water.

The Biden administration will be allocating more than $120 million to tribal governments to fight the impacts of climate change, the Department of the Interior announced Thursday. The funding is designed to help tribal nations adapt to climate threats, including relocating infrastructure.

Severe storms with probable tornadoes tore through several central U.S. states, damaging homes and businesses and killing at least three people, with more bodies likely to be discovered, authorities said. As the sun rose Friday, officials scrambled to assess the extent of the destruction with the power out.

The three deaths came in Logan County, Ohio, according to the sheriff's office there. Thursday night's storms also left trails of destruction in Kentucky, Indiana and Arkansas. Tornadoes were also suspected in Illinois and Missouri.

Thousands in Colorado were without power as authorities closed highways and schools during a winter storm that pummeled the Denver area and threatened to drop another half foot there overnight into Friday.

The storm comes as other parts of the country face severe weather. Massive chunks of hail pelted parts of Kansas and Missouri on Wednesday night, with storms unleashing possible tornadoes in Kansas. Earlier this month, a blizzard dumped more than 10 feet (3 meters) of snow on a northern California ski resort.

American oil and natural gas wells, pipelines and compressors are spewing three times the amount of the potent heat-trapping gas methane as the government thinks, causing $9.3 billion in yearly climate damage, a new comprehensive study calculates.

But because more than half of these methane emissions are coming from a tiny number of oil and gas sites, 1% or less, this means the problem is both worse than the government thought but also fairly fixable, said the lead author of a study in Wednesday's journal Nature.