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Firefighters in Colorado braced for high winds that threatened to blow the state’s most destructive fire in recorded history from treetop to treetop on Sunday.

Making his descent from the mountaintop Thursday morning, bicyclist Kent Bell rolled smack into the filmy haze coating this resort town. Forty miles away, near Friday's finish line of the Ride the Rockies endurance test, one of the largest fires in Colorado history raged out of control.

Hundreds of vehicles were left damaged after softball-sized hail rained down on parts of Dallas, Texas.

One person was dead as massive wildfires in drought-parched Colorado and New Mexico burned out of control, while Western lawmakers pleaded for updates to an aging U.S. aerial firefighting fleet needed to combat a fire season that lasts year-round.

As many as 50 people are feared entombed under tons of rock and stone that buried a village in a landslide after two earthquakes in northern Afghanistan, authorities said Tuesday....

Firefighters on Sunday were fighting wildfires that have spread quickly in parched forests in Colorado and New Mexico, forcing hundreds of people from their homes and the evacuation of wolves from a sanctuary.

Several lightning-sparked wildfires blazed around the state as dry thunderstorms moved in Sunday and Monday.

A strong earthquake off Indonesia's coast caused tall buildings to sway in the capital Monday afternoon, but officials said there was no threat of a tsunami. Office workers said the swaying was felt for about 10 seconds in high-rise buildings around the city of 9 million people. Even two-story residential homes shook strongly. No damage or casualties were immediately reported.

...And yet — step for a moment into the chill. The outdoor climate of our sweltering city is a false climate. It is merely the swamp through which we must wade to get to our true environment, a land of recirculated cold, spare blazers on backs of chairs and frostbite. Inside weather is the weather of the office worker. It’s summer outside, but indoors, it’s winter.

After recalculating data from last year, the nation's climatologists are declaring that Oklahoma suffered through the hottest summer ever recorded in the U.S. last year - not Texas as initially announced last fall.