India, July 2 -- Paris-region hospital, emergency medics needed it to plunge patients into cold-water baths to speedily bring down their temperatures so they wouldn't join the growing tally of dead from a record-smashing heatwave. But lacking an ice-making machine, where to get it?

A fast-food restaurant helped out last week, saying the hospital could take its ice. Staff also bought ice from the supermarket. The Paris-Saclay Hospital has now ordered its own ice machine, eagerly awaited in the emergency department for a future attack of sizzling heat. Whether that hits next week, as France's weather service says it might, or in the summer months ahead, medics and hospital administrators are acutely aware that the battle they've just endur...