For several hours, the floodwaters rose until they swept away Miguel Rutigliano Bieleski’s home, his wife and his two children. Bieleski said he only survived by clinging on to the branch of a tree.

Bieleski, 35, is one of many Brazilians in the south of the country struggling to rebuild their lives after being battered by a tropical cyclone this week. Around 7,700 people are estimated to have lost their homes, according to government officials.

At least 41 people died from the storm, with 46 still missing, according to authorities from Rio Grande do Sul state, which has declared a public emergency. Weather forecasters predict more rains before the deluge dissipates by Sunday.

Bieleski lives in the town of Lajeado, which was badly hit by floodwaters from the engorged Taquari river.

He blamed emergency services for the deaths of his wife and children, saying they had urged him to stay in his home to await help that never arrived.

“They did nothing,” he said, adding he is now facing the consequences.

Rio Grande do Sul emergency services did not respond to a request for comment.

Paulo Ricardo Siqueira Santos, who is also from Lajeado, now sleeps in his car after his home was filled with mud and water.

Before escaping, the 65-year-old retiree managed to save his gardening tools, his only means of subsistence apart from donations of food and water.

He said he was worried thieves would ransack whatever belongings remained, and he now lives in his car.

Britain recorded its hottest day of the year so far on Saturday, the country’s national weather service said, with provisional data showing a high of 32.7 degrees Celsius (90.9 degrees Fahrenheit) at Heathrow airport.

This year’s previous high was 32.6 C, which was reached on Thursday.

The Met Office said Saturday was also the sixth day in a row the UK has recorded a temperature over 30 C – well above average for the time of year.

The Met Office said last week that Britain had experienced its eighth warmest summer since 1884.

June was the hottest on record in the country. A wet July and a mixed August followed.

In July 2022, Britain recorded its hottest ever day when temperatures topped the 40 C mark for the first time.

Rescue teams took people out of floodwaters in inflatable boats and in bulldozers on Saturday as they moved into villages hit hardest by a sweeping rainstorm that killed at least 10 people in central Greece this week.

Storm Daniel, which meteorologists said was the worst to hit the country since records began in 1930, pummelled Greece for three days from Tuesday, leaving a trail of ruin after a record summer heatwave that had touched off huge wildfires.

Homes were swept away by torrents, bridges collapsed, roads were destroyed, power lines fell and crops in the fertile Thessaly plain were wiped out.

Authorities, who have struggled to evacuate people from flooded areas, raised the death toll to 10 people on Friday afternoon. Four people have been reported missing, they said.

On Saturday, rescue teams were moving into villages near the city of Larissa and close to the River Pineios.

The fire brigade has so far evacuated 2,806 people across the country. In Thessaly region, many residents were airlifted from the rooftops of submerged homes on Friday and Saturday.

An 80-year old fisherman with a small blue fishing boat helped evacuate at least 15 people in a village in the area of Karditsa, one of the worst-hit areas, according to iefimerida website on Friday night.

“I’m an old boatman, I have experienced another four floods in the village. This was the worst,” he told media.

Authorities shut the national highway connecting Athens with the northern city of Thessaloniki on Saturday due to the floods.

The deluge in Greece followed a huge wildfire in the north and the country’s hottest summer on record. Scientists say the country is on the front line of climate change, with freak weather incidents increasingly common.

Extreme weather events have struck across the globe in recent weeks, with floods in Scandinavia, southeast Europe and Hong Kong. In contrast, India had its driest August since records began more than a century ago.

A powerful earthquake in Morocco has killed more than 1,000 people and injured hundreds more, the country’s deadliest in more than six decades, toppling houses in remote mountain villages where rescuers dug through rubble for survivors.

The quake struck in Morocco’s High Atlas mountains late on Friday night, damaging historic buildings in Marrakech, the nearest city to the epicentre, while the most badly affected areas were in the mountains nearby.

The Interior Ministry said 1,037 people had been killed and another 672 injured by the quake, gauged by the U.S. Geological Survey at a magnitude of 6.8 with an epicentre some 72 km (45 miles) southwest of Marrakech.

In the village of Amizmiz near the epicentre rescue workers picked through rubble with their bare hands.

About 20 men including firefighters and soldiers in fatigues stood atop the ruin of a house in Amizmiz as they tried to remove rubble, bits of carpet and furniture protruding from gaps between pancaked concrete floors.

The quake, which hit at around 11 p.m. (2200 GMT), affected a sweep of the High Atlas mountain range. Tremors were felt as far away as Huelva and Jaen in Andalusia in southern Spain, Spanish television RTVE reported.

Street camera footage in Marrakech showed the moment the earth began to shake, as men suddenly looked around and jumped up, and others ran for shelter into an alleyway and then fled as dust and debris tumbled around them.

In Marrakech, where 13 people were confirmed dead, residents spent the night in the open, afraid to go home.

In the heart of its old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, a mosque minaret had fallen in Jemaa al-Fna Square.

Injured people filtered into Marrakech from the surrounding areas seeking treatment.

State television footage from the Moulay Ibrahim area some 40 km (25 miles) south of Marrakech showed dozens of houses collapsed at the foothills of a mountain, and residents digging graves as groups of women stood in the street.

Montasir Itri, a resident of the village of Asni near the epicentre, said most houses there were damaged.

“Our neighbours are under the rubble and people are working hard to rescue them using available means in the village,” he said.

Further west, near Taroudant, teacher Hamid Afkar said he had fled his home and felt aftershocks.

“The earth shook for about 20 seconds. Doors opened and shut by themselves as I rushed downstairs from the second floor,” he said.

In Marrakech, residents described desperate scenes as people fled for safety.

“I still can’t sleep in the house because of the shock and also because the old town is made up of old houses,” said Jaouhari Mohamed, an old city resident.

Moroccan state television broadcast images of troops deploying to help with rescue efforts.

It was Morocco’s deadliest earthquake since 1960 when a quake was estimated to have killed at least 12,000 people, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. At a depth of 18.5 km, experts said this was an unusually large tremor for the area.

Indonesia is expecting its rainy season to start in November, a month later than usual, after a longer dry season caused by the El Nino weather pattern, its meteorology agency (BMKG) said on Friday.

Indonesia’s dry season is forecast to be the most severe since 2019, peaking this month and in October, bringing a threat to harvests and a risk of forest fires.

BMKG predicted a rainy season starting November in more than 60% of Indonesia including most provinces in Java and Sulawesi islands, adding rainfall would be relatively normal but the agriculture sector would be impacted.

“It’s rather a problem because most farmers already had a timeline on their harvest but now the rainy season will come late,” BMKG head Dwikorita Karnawati told a press conference.

Long hot weather has disrupted rice production and pushed up rice prices.

Those could hit a multi-year high of 15,000 rupiah ($0.98) per kg, according to Zaid Zulkifly Rasyid, chairman of a cooperative of rice wholesalers in Indonesia’s largest market, Cipinang.

The government has said it would launch an 8 trillion rupiah ($521.51 million) social assistance programme to get more rice to 21 million lower income households from September to November.

BMKG also warned the peak of the wet season would come in January and February next year with a risk of landslides and floods in some provinces, including as South and Central Kalimantan, Lampung, North Sulawesi, and North Maluku.

Indonesia, which is prone to floods, landslides and sometimes cyclones during its rainy season, will hold its presidential and legislative election in February.

Helicopters winched people from rooftops and military personnel used rubber boats to rescue families from floodwaters up to 3 metres deep in central Greece on Friday after a devastating rainstorm killed at least 10 people.

Storm Daniel, which meteorologists said was the worst to hit the country since records began in 1930, pummelled Greece for three days, leaving a trail of ruin after a record summer heatwave that had touched off huge wildfires.

Homes were swept away by torrents, bridges collapsed, roads were made impassable, power lines fell and crops in the fertile Thessaly plain were wiped out.

Civil protection authorities confirmed a death toll of 10, with four people missing. It said 1,700 people had been rescued in total, among them 296 airlifted away from their homes. Residents said the water was 3 metres (9 ft) deep in places.

Dozens of villages in the region were submerged. People who called in to TV stations said hundreds of people were still stranded. Residents, many of them farmers, were despondent at the work of a lifetime disappearing in hours.

“The damage we have all suffered to our homes is irreparable. A lifetime’s worth of work (was lost) within two hours,” said Haralampos Tsergas, 59, from the village of Palamas.

Another Palamas resident, Evripidis Manoukas, 46, sitting on a trailer with other locals and their pets after being rescued, said the water level had risen quickly.

“We made an attempt to open the door, more water was coming in, so we closed it again and left through the windows,” he said.

As well as the human devastation, the storm will deal an economic blow to the country which emerged from a decade-long debilitating debt crisis in 2018, but Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said it could withstand the disaster.

“Greece’s economy is now strong enough to tough out such a catastrophe. I will also mobilise every European resource so that we can get additional help to cover, firstly, necessary compensation for households,” he said during a visit to the region.

The heaviest rain since records began 140 years ago drenched Asian financial hub Hong Kong on Friday, killing two people and injuring more than 140, state media reported, as unusually wet weather caused by typhoons brought more disruption to southern China.

As of 8:15 pm (1215 GMT) on Friday, 144 residents aged between eight and 94 years old were injured amid the heavy rainfall, the Hong Kong government said in a statement.

Videos showed water cascading down steep hillsides in the former British colony, flooding waist-deep in narrow streets, and inundating malls, metro stations and tunnels.

The extreme weather also brought chaos to the nearby Chinese city of Shenzhen, a tech hub of more than 17.7 million people, with business and transport links across the economically important Pearl River Delta severely hit.

The torrential rain was brought by Haikui, a typhoon that made landfall in the Chinese province of Fujian on Tuesday. Although it later weakened to a tropical depression, its slow-moving clouds have dumped huge volumes of precipitation on areas still soaked by rain from a super typhoon a week earlier.

Hong Kong’s weather bureau issued its highest “black” rainstorm warning early on Friday. It said more than 200 mm (7.9 inches) of rain was recorded on Hong Kong’s main island, the Kowloon district and the northeastern part of the city’s New Territories from late on Thursday.

The alert was lowered by 6 p.m. (1000 GMT) but authorities warned of risks from ongoing flooding.

The city’s leader, John Lee, said he was very concerned about the severe flooding in most parts of the territory and had instructed all departments to respond with “all-out efforts”.

Hong Kong authorities shut schools on Friday and told workers to stay home. The city’s stock exchange was also closed.

Eric Chan, secretary for administration, said Hong Kong’s transport network was “severely disrupted” and an “extreme conditions situation” would be extended to midnight on Friday.

MTR Corp (0066.HK), which operates the city’s rail network, said at least one line was shut while others were operating with delays. One video clip showed metro workers wading waist-deep in a station.

Some roads were partly washed out, including a main route to the city’s southern beaches. A car was swallowed up by a metres-wide pothole when one section of road collapsed, social media pictures showed.

A person taken by rescue workers to hospital was pronounced dead on arrival, a television news channel reported.

Hong Kong’s cross-harbour tunnel, one of the main arteries connecting the island to Kowloon, was inundated and a shopping mall in the Chai Wan district was half-submerged.

Some passenger and cargo clearance operations at two border points between Hong Kong and Shenzhen were suspended due to flooding.

Macau ferry operators in Hong Kong said several sailings would be suspended to the gambling hub.

More than 100 pigs in an area near the border with Shenzhen drowned in a flood, media reported.

Seljalandsfoss is a unique waterfall which is along the river Seljalandsá, in the southern part of the Republic of Iceland.

As one of the best-known waterfalls in Iceland, it is quite famous all around the world due to the fact that every person who is visiting the waterfall can walk behind it into a small cave.

With 60 meters (200 feet) in height, it definitely is one of the biggest in the country, and the water from the Seljalandsá River comes from the volcano glacier Eyjafjallajokull that erupted recently.

The access to Seljalandsfoss Waterfall is easy because it is located exactly next to the Ring Road, a road that stretches all around the island nation and as a matter in fact it is the main highway. In the vicinity of Seljalandsfoss there are several other falls, although Seljalandsfoss offers the best view in which every single person can enjoy.

The mesmerizing waterfall can also offer rainbows when there is sun which adds more to the pure joy a person can experience. True paradise on Earth!