PARIS (AP) — France gritted its teeth Monday for a week of record-busting temperatures, sweltering under a heat wave that combines daytime highs above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and sleep-robbing sweaty nights.
The national weather service, Meteo France, said that most of the country — the largest in the European Union and the second most populous — is entering what it described as a "plateau" of unrelenting heat-wave conditions that isn't forecast to start easing before Friday.
Human-caused climate change is tied to increasing extreme weather, and U.N. climate agency projections say the next five years should shatter more heat records.
