Peva Levy said he felt a powerful, natural energy known as "mana" when he surfed Teahupo'o's waves on a piece of plywood for the first time, rushing down a crumbling white surf in front of an untouched volcanic beach several years before the steady streams of surfers started arriving when the village got its first asphalt road over fifty years ago.

"It was a secret spot," the surfer and Tahitian native remembered, as he stood on the pristine beaches of Teahupo'o on the island's south side, waves crashing off in the distance. "But it was not a secret spot for a long time."

Italy's northern Lombardy region imposed severe antismog measures across Milan and eight surrounding provinces Tuesday to combat a particularly bad period of air pollution.

The measures bar heavy motor vehicles from operating during the day and impose limits on heating and industrial agricultural activities in the nine provinces.

Another wet winter storm swamped California with heavy rainfall on Monday, flooding the runways at a regional airport and leading to several rescues on swollen rivers and creeks.

The Santa Barbara airport, on the state's central coast, closed Monday after as much as 10 inches (25 centimeters) of rain had fallen in the area by noon, covering the runways with water.

Cambodia hopes to import four tigers from India this year under an agreement signed with New Delhi aimed at reviving the population of big cats in the kingdom, an environmental official said Monday.

Cambodia's dry forests were once home to scores of Indochinese tigers but conservationists say intensive poaching of both tigers and their prey has devastated their numbers.

Record hot seawater killed more than three-quarters of human-cultivated coral that scientists had placed in the Florida Keys in recent years in an effort to prop up a threatened species that's highly vulnerable to climate change, researchers discovered.

Researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week returned to five reefs where they planted staghorn and elkhorn coral, both classified as threatened in the endangered species list, to see how the repopulated critters had survived prolonged water temperatures in the 90s (30s Celsius) last summer and fall. Most of them didn't. They saw widespread death in both repopulated and wild coral on five Florida Keys reefs.

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.