The 18-year-olds died in an accident on an off-roading track.

Waikato pubs made it into the Top 50 New Zealand Gastropubs awards.

Cops calculated former Mob boss would have had to have made more than 5000 pipes.

A Queensland woman has shared frightening footage of a man leaping onto her windscreen and smashing the glass with his bare fists while she was driving at night.

The incident happened on Saturday evening as the woman was driving home from work in Redland, south-east of Brisbane.

Dashcam footage shows the female driver, who asked not to be identified, turning her car onto Freeth Street West in the suburb of Ormiston at about 7.30pm.

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The road is dark and a man and a woman can be seen walking in the middle of the tarmac.

While the woman moves to the side, the man veers directly into the path of the car.

"When I saw the couple I stopped," the driver said, adding the couple appeared to be in the middle of an argument.

The driver attempts to drive slowly around the man, but he moves to block her way.

"Then he just turned around, jumped on the bonnet and punched the windscreen several times," the driver said.

"It happened so quickly, it was a shock."

The driver said the man also attempted to open the passenger side of her car, but the doors were locked.

The driver said she was trapped, unable to move the car for several seconds while the man was on the bonnet.

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"I couldn't speed off because the woman was behind the car and if I reversed I could've hit her," she said.

"I couldn't go forward because the car detected a person in front and stopped. 

"I couldn't move the vehicle forward until he jumped off the bonnet, that's when I took off. 

The driver then drove to Cleveland Police Station, with the shattered glass from the windscreen falling on her and cutting her hands.

"I couldn't see a thing in front of me, I really don't know how I got home that night."

A spokesperson for Queensland Police said officers were investigating the incident.

The driver told 9news.com.au she wanted to share the footage as a warning to drivers in the community.

"I need this to be out there to show people that it can happen to anybody," she said.

"It could have been a mum with kids in the car.

"That street that this happened on has got two retirement villages on each side. There are a lot of elderly people going in and out as well."

Western Australia police have appealed to the public to help locate the owner of a container of human ashes left on a bus in Perth.

The container was left on a bus in Rockingham on February 24 this year, police said.

The box was held closed with a rubber band, with the name "Ranga" written on it.

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The only other identifying information was a pair of dates reading "24th/4th/77" and "29th/4th/23".

The dates indicate that the person may have died in April 2023, aged 46.

Rockingham police said on Tuesday that the container's owner could attend Rockingham Police station to claim the misplaced ashes.

"Please attend Rockingham Police Station to claim."

The founder of a female-only app waged an "online campaign" against a transgender woman she had refused to allow as a user, a court has heard.

Roxanne Tickle is suing the Giggle for Girls app and its founder, Sall Grover, to the tune of $100,000 for alleged discrimination based on her gender identity, a Federal Court hearing was told on Thursday.

Tickle is seeking an additional $100,000 for aggravated damages, based on an online campaign allegedly waged against her by Grover largely on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

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The court heard Grover has persistently misgendered Tickle in media interviews and across hundreds of posts she made about the case to her roughly 93,000 online followers.

Lawyer for Tickle, Georgina Costello told the court her client had received an "enormous" amount of online hate as a result of Grover's actions.

The Giggle app was created by Grover as "safe space" for women to interact with each other, free from male patterns of online violence, the court heard previously.

Grover blocked Tickle and refused to reinstate her based on a selfie uploaded by her to the app, which she perceived to be of a man, the court was told.

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Even when Grover was made aware Tickle identifies as a woman and holds a female birth certificate, she refused to accept her as such, Costello told the court.

"We say because of the way Grover views transgender women, she was unable to see that a transgender woman is a woman," Costello said.

The hearing continues.

She says paying experts is cheaper than going ahead with the failed mega ferry project.

Some voters seem to have forgotten about this weekend's Cook by-election, with the Australian Electoral Commission saying it is concerned about the potential for a low turnout and issuing a gentle reminder that voters who don't cast a ballot will face a fine.

The vote to decide who takes former prime minister Scott Morrison's southern Sydney seat will be held on Saturday, but the AEC says low early and postal ballot numbers have it worried about low participation.

"While by-elections traditionally have lower turnout than a full federal election, it's still below expectations, and just as important to have your say," Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers said.

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"The early voting numbers we're seeing are down by approximately 11.2 per cent based on the same period in the 2022 federal election and nearly 13 per cent for the same period in the 2023 referendum in the division.

"Postal vote applications closed yesterday, and those numbers are down slightly as well.

"While it may be that more people vote on by-election day this time around, typically if someone casts their vote early in one election, they'll do so in the next one – this is why the numbers we're seeing makes us worry about low participation."

As of yesterday, just under 18,500 residents in the southern Sydney seat had cast an early vote – down on numbers from the same time in both the last federal election (20,769) and the Voice to parliament referendum (21,143).

Just under 112,000 people are enrolled to vote in Cook.

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The AEC has indicated low levels of political campaigning and media coverage could be behind the low levels of early voting.

"We've sent every Cook household an official guide, we're advertising, we're sending text messages and emails, we're also on social media regularly and in discussion with media representatives," Rogers said.

"While it is more communication for a single by-election than we've ever done, ultimately we know that political campaigning activities and media coverage are always key vehicles for awareness and motivation."

"Failure to vote may result in a fine and will mean you have no say on who represents you in parliament."

Unlike the recent by-elections in the Melbourne seats of Aston and Dunkley, Cook is shaping up as something of a political no-contest.

A safe Liberal seat, it's been held by the party since the 1970s. While the Liberals selected management consultant Simon Kennedy to run for Cook, Labor decided against putting up a candidate in the by-election altogether.

Early voting centres are open until 6pm on Friday, and polling places will be open between 8am and 6pm on Saturday.

You can find where to vote in the Cook by-election on the AEC website.

Tropical Cyclone Paul has been declared off the coast of Far North Queensland, the Bureau of Meteorology confirmed today.

The category 2 tropical cyclone formed rapidly overnight and sits around 1000 kilometres north-east of Cairns.

The cyclone is growing in intensity and could reach category three later this afternoon.

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The tropical cyclone is slowly moving south-east from the coral sea, whipping up winds up to 92 kilometres per hour.

The BoM predicts that the cyclone will not impact the Australian mainland or islands off the east coast of Australia.

Yesterday the BoM predicted only a fifteen per cent chance that the tropical low system would develop into a cyclone.

Today, they upgraded that prediction, confirming that the latest tropical cyclone in the season had formed.

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According to meteorology service Weatherzone, Tropical Cyclone Paul should weaken from Friday onwards and is expected to have dip below tropical cyclone strength by Saturday.

All ships in the area of Tropical Cyclone Paul were asked to send weather reports to the BoM every three hours.

Tropical Cyclone Pau is the seventh tropical cyclone of the season, and the next cyclone to form will be named Tropical Cyclone Robyn.

A landmark European decision will "inspire" Australian climate change campaigners, a legal expert believes, as activists increasingly hit the courts to try to force governments and companies into stronger action.

Australia already has the second largest number of climate cases globally, behind the United States, but an international court's finding that Switzerland violated its citizens' rights with climate change policy failures, may prompt even more.

There are a range of huge differences between Australia and Europe in this context, not least of which is the lack of any national human rights bill or treaty.

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The European Court of Human Rights can't be applied directly here. But Melbourne Climate Futures director Professor Jackie Peel said that wouldn't stop local activists from making very similar arguments under different laws.

One area that's already being explored is using Indigenous rights laws to raise similar complaints to those that would be run under broader human rights laws overseas.  

"In Australia, I think we are leading on some of these cases involving Indigenous peoples, First Nations communities who've really been at the forefront of showing how climate might be impacting their communities," Peel said.

"Another really interesting area that we're seeing emerging – completely different – is cases against companies, particularly around disclosures of climate risks, or where they're setting targets, net-zero targets, for example, that might be considered to be greenwashing."

Just last month, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission won a legal challenge against investment firm Vanguard, which had offered investment options it claimed excluded companies with significant business in fossil fuels and other activities.

The Federal Court found for ASIC after Vanguard admitted a "significant proportion" of securities weren't properly researched or screened.

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ASIC deputy chair Sarah Court said its first greenwashing court win sent a strong message to companies making sustainable investment claims.

Globally, some 2000 climate change cases have been brought before the courts as campaigners increasingly look beyond parliaments and protests for ways to force governments to act.

"I think it's been motivated in some respects, by a feeling that the policy response hadn't been adequate, particularly in Australia for many years at the federal level. So a frustration with that and trying to find another avenue to take climate action forward," Peel said. 

"But also the courts are uniquely placed to make rulings on things like justice and people's human rights. So if you're framing climate change as a matter of rights and justice, then the courts are a logical place to go for articulating those sorts of claims."

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Peel said the action was yet to force a "tsunami of policy change" but "the feeling is that it's a matter of time".

"As these cases mount up, they will actually start to have big impacts on the direction of policy and corporate responses," the University of Melbourne academic said.

The environmental and climate change law expert agreed a huge increase in the number of these cases could be on the horizon and governments said needed to plan ahead or risk "unleashing climate impacts on your population".

"The impacts of climate change are being more readily felt by many communities. You just have to look at some of the events in Australia in recent times around fires and floods," she said.

"People recognise that the environment is changing, and that it's having real impacts on people, property, livelihoods, and that's the kind of thing that's going to generate more litigation over time."

The Swiss case, said to be the first international decision confirming countries have an obligation to protect people from the effects of climate change, sets a legal precedent in the Council of Europe's 46 member states, which doesn't include Australia.

The court ruled Switzerland "had failed to comply with its duties" to combat climate change and meet emissions targets.

That was a violation of the rights of a group called Senior Women for Climate Protection, it found, noting that the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees people "effective protection by the state authorities from the serious adverse effects of climate change on their lives, health, well-being and quality of life".

The women had argued they were particularly affected because older women were more vulnerable to extreme heat.

– Reported with Associated Press.