A fire raging in the historic and much-visited Fontainebleau forest south of Paris on Monday prompted evacuations of some residential neighborhoods and disrupted train and highway traffic.

It was among several wildfires in western Europe as the region bakes under its third red-alert heat wave this year.

A wildfire killed 12 people in southern Spain as soaring temperatures gripped much of the country, Spanish authorities said early Friday.

Several victims of the fire in Los Gallardos were found inside burnt-out vehicles, local media reported. Six others have been injured in the blaze, which 150 firefighters were battling.

The morning sun beats down on Antonio Reina as he tends to a public garden in Barcelona, but he works reassured that a simple wristband protects him in the summer heat.

The device contains a sensor that detects body temperature. If Reina gets dangerously hot at the risk of making a potentially deadly heatstroke likelier, a red light and a sound raise the alarm.

A landslide in China's northwestern Gansu province killed five people on Tuesday, with rescuers working to locate 12 others still missing, state media reported.

At least 33 people were initially reported missing after the landslide in a village near Gansu's Longnan city, state news agency Xinhua said.

A large wildfire in the south of France prompted Tour de France organizers to ban fans from attending the finale of the third stage of cycling's showpiece race on Monday.

After a couple of days in Spain, the race enters France with a stage to the Pyrenees town of Les Angles, about 60 kilometers (37 miles) from a fire that has burned large swathes of land.

Deaths surged by nearly a third in France during the hottest week of a record heat wave last month, the country's public health authority said Friday, reporting at least 2,000 more deaths than in the previous week when temperatures were already climbing and filling emergency wards with heat victims.

The new and still incomplete figures from Public Health France doubled its first preliminary estimate of at least 1,000 additional deaths that it gave last Sunday. That earlier estimate covered just three of the hottest days of extreme, deadly heat.

Wildfires raged in the south of France on Thursday after weeks of dry weather and record temperatures across the country, devastating large swaths of land.

The biggest fire spread in the Aude and Herault regions, where up to 800 firefighters and 150 vehicles were deployed to tackle the flames that ran over 900 hectares (2,200 acres), local authorities said.

A powerful storm struck Romania 's capital overnight into Wednesday, killing one person and causing flooding in 20 counties following an intense heatwave.

The torrential storm hit 60 localities, and emergency services pumped water from more than 350 houses and 100 streets, according to the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations, or IGSU.

Ice. Urgently and in large quantities.

At a Paris-region hospital, emergency medics needed it to plunge patients into cold-water baths to speedily bring down their temperatures so they wouldn't join the growing tally of dead from a record-smashing heat wave. But lacking an ice-making machine, where to get it?

These unbearably hot and humid summer months that put millions of people across the globe at risk are typically made possible by phenomena known as heat domes.

Heat domes can make already-high temperatures even more extreme and prolonged, and they are worsening in severity and becoming more frequent as the planet warms.