Sun-choking debris cast off by volcanoes more than 2,000 years ago starved headwaters feeding the Nile river and hastened the downfall of ancient Egypt's last kingdom, researchers said Tuesday.

Some 216,000 homes and businesses were still without electricity and 20,000 without running water in Ireland on Tuesday, the day after Storm Ophelia hit the country, claiming three lives.

Large numbers of hungry, aggressive bears are approaching humans and have killed two people in Russia's far east due to depleting food sources, a forestry worker told AFP Monday. 

Forestry authorities on Sakhalin island last week said 83 bears had to be shot dead because they were hostile, a figure that has nearly tripled from last year.

Ireland has ordered all schools to close Monday as the country braces for an "unprecedented storm" with the arrival of Ophelia, the largest hurricane ever recorded so far east in the Atlantic Ocean.

At least 27 people have died in fires which have ravaged forests in northern and central Portugal over the past 24 hours, rescuers said Monday, as three people were killed in Spain in blazes sparked by arsonists and fanned by Hurricane Ophelia.

In Portugal, Prime Minister Antonio Costa declared a state of emergency as more than 5,800 firefighters fought some 30 major fires still raging Monday.

Vietnam braced Monday for fresh storms as the official death toll from last week's floods and landslides rose to 72.

Hurricane Ophelia moved eastward over the mid-Atlantic Friday as a category two storm packing winds gusting at up to 105 miles (165 kilometers) per hour en route for the Azores.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday easily approved a $36.5 billion disaster relief package for hurricane-affected communities like Puerto Rico, and for areas devastated by wildfires including those in California.

The measure outlining "supplemental" disaster spending passed 353 to 69, with all votes in opposition coming from President Donald Trump's Republican Party.

Paris city authorities said Thursday they aimed to phase out the use of diesel cars by the time the French capital hosts the Olympics in 2024, and petrol cars by 2030.

Dismissed a decade ago as far-fetched and dangerous, schemes to tame global warming by engineering the climate have migrated from the margins of policy debate towards center stage.

"Plan A" remains tackling the problem at its source. But efforts to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions have fallen woefully short and cannot, most scientists agree, avert catastrophic climate change on their own.