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At least 188 people died and nearly 1,500 were injured June 24 after two devastating earthquakes hit a minute apart in northern Venezuela, the Caribbean nation with a long and deadly quake history.

The U.S. Geological Survey, using predictive modeling to estimate the death toll, said it would most likely run into the thousands, with a substantial probability of exceeding 10,000. A website set up to track missing people by leaders from the country's opposition said that about 24,000 people remain unaccounted for, Reuters reported.

The two quakes, with magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5, struck shortly after 6 p.m. local time. They were two of the strongest quakes to hit Venezuela in more than a century.

Quakes of 7.0 to 7.9 magnitude are considered major, capable of causing severe, widespread damage.

Venezuela is vulnerable to powerful quakes because it’s on the active tectonic boundary between the Caribbean Plate and the South American Plate. The two giant plates grind past each other, building stress across several major faults.

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France recorded its hottest day ever Tuesday as an early heat wave gripped Europe, prompting the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre museum to restrict visiting hours and disrupting school and transportation schedules in multiple countries.

Punishing temperatures extended to the United Kingdom and Spain, where weather agencies issued red alerts — like France — about the risks of extreme heat for tens of millions of people.

The record of 29.8 C (85.6 F) for France's national thermal indicator — an average of temperatures measured at 30 weather stations — was only the latest in a series of never-before-registered highs heaped on Europe's largest country. The conditions were likely to persist at least until the weekend.

"Further record-breaking temperatures are expected, including some that could surpass all previous records, regardless of the time of year," the Meteo France weather service said.

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A magnitude 7.8 earthquake centered at sea shook part of the southern Philippines early Monday, causing damage in a key coastal city, knocking down power and setting off 1-meter (3-foot) tsunami waves along nearby coasts, officials said.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. asked people to immediately go to higher ground in Philippine areas vulnerable to a tsunami, and Indonesian and Malaysian authorities also issued warnings to their nearby coastal areas.

There were no immediate reports of casualties, and it was not clear if people were trapped or injured in the collapse of at least one small building in General Santos, a tuna-processing city of more than 700,000 people that is also a commercial hub in the south.

The strongest earthquake to hit the Philippines this year was was centered at sea about 13 kilometers (8 miles) southwest of General Santos and was caused by movement in the Cotabato Trench at a depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), according to the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology. It struck at 7:37 a.m., the institute's director, Teresito Bacolcol said.

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Modern roads in the United States will last for decades. And yet the damage they cause in our national forests is immediate.

Since 2001, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule has protected more than 58m acres of national forests from development, barring road construction and timber harvests. The policy came to be with huge bipartisan support; almost 2 million people submitted comments on it, the majority of whom championed the protections.

Now the US secretary of agriculture, Brooke L Rollins, is working to rescind the “Roadless Rule”, opening up public lands – our lands – for logging and other development to the highest bidder.

This is just one prong in the Trump administration’s campaign to remake public lands in ways that most Americans would find.

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American territories are recovering after a category 5 super typhoon hit Western Pacific islands before peak storm season.

Typhoon Sinlaku hit Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands beginning April 11 after rapidly developing into a category 5 storm. Territorial and federal officials have issued emergency declarations. The storm left power outages, flooded homes and roofs ripped from homes in its wake. So far, no deaths have been reported.

The powerful storm, which had winds reach at least 175 mph, hit before most typhoons form between May and October, though NASA said the season is yearlong in the Western Pacific.

“We’re actively recovering to get our people back into their business and to their lives again,” Guam Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero said in an April 16 video address.

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Responding to public health concerns about microplastics and pharmaceuticals in the nation's drinking water, the Trump administration for the first time has placed them on a draft list of contaminants maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA announced the move Thursday, touting it as a "historic step" for the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement, which often raises concerns about toxic chemicals and plastic pollution in our food and environment.

"This is a direct response to the concern of millions of Americans, who have long demanded answers about what they and their families are drinking every day," EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a briefing Thursday.

Also Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a $144 million initiative, called STOMP, to develop tools to measure and monitor microplastics in drinking water and in a later stage, to remove them.

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