One attendee described her day out as the ‘worst experience ever’.

Climate change worsened by human behaviour made 2025 one of the three hottest years on record, scientists said.

It was also the first time that the three-year temperature average broke through the threshold set in the 2015 Paris Agreement of limiting warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times.

Experts say that keeping the Earth below that limit could save lives and prevent catastrophic environmental destruction around the globe.

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The analysis from World Weather Attribution researchers came after a year when people around the world were slammed by the dangerous extremes brought on by a warming planet.

Temperatures remained high despite the presence of a La Nina, the occasional natural cooling of Pacific Ocean waters that influences weather worldwide.

Researchers cited the continued burning of fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal — that send planet-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

“If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels very, very, quickly, very soon, it will be very hard to keep that goal” of warming, Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution and an Imperial College London climate scientist, told The Associated Press. “The science is increasingly clear.”

Extremes in 2025

Extreme weather events kill thousands of people and cost billions of dollars in damage annually.

WWA scientists identified 157 extreme weather events as most severe in 2025, meaning they met criteria such as causing more than 100 deaths, affecting more than half an area’s population or having a state of emergency declared.

Of those, they closely analysed 22.

That included dangerous heat waves, which the WWA said were the world's deadliest extreme weather events in 2025.

The researchers said some of the heat waves they studied in 2025 were 10 times more likely than they would have been a decade ago due to climate change.

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“The heat waves we have observed this year are quite common events in our climate today, but they would have been almost impossible to occur without human-induced climate change,” Otto said. “It makes a huge difference.”

Meanwhile, prolonged drought contributed to wildfires that scorched Greece and Turkey.

Torrential rains and flooding in Mexico killed dozens of people and left many more missing.

Super Typhoon Fung-wong slammed the Philippines, forcing more than a million people to evacuate. Monsoon rains battered India with floods and landslides.

The WWA said the increasingly frequent and severe extremes threatened the ability of millions of people across the globe to respond and adapt to those events with enough warning, time and resources, what the scientists call “limits of adaptation.”

The report pointed to Hurricane Melissa as an example: The storm intensified so quickly that it made forecasting and planning more difficult, and pummeled Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti so severely that it left the small island nations unable to respond to and handle its extreme losses and damage.

Global climate negotiations sputter out

This year's United Nations climate talks in Brazil in November ended without any explicit plan to transition away from fossil fuels, and though more money was pledged to help countries adapt to climate change, they will take more time to do it.

Officials, scientists, and analysts have conceded that Earth’s warming will overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius, though some say reversing that trend remains possible.

Yet different nations are seeing varying levels of progress.

China is rapidly deploying renewable energies including solar and wind power — but it is also continuing to invest in coal.

Though increasingly frequent extreme weather has spurred calls for climate action across Europe, some nations say that limits economic growth.

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Meanwhile, in the US, the Trump administration has steered the nation away from clean-energy policy in favor of measures that support coal, oil and gas.

“The geopolitical weather is very cloudy this year with a lot of policymakers very clearly making policies for the interest of the fossil fuel industry rather than for the populations of their countries," Otto said.

“And we have a huge amount of mis- and disinformation that people have to deal with.”

Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher at the Columbia University Climate School who wasn't involved in the WWA work, said places are seeing disasters they aren't used to, extreme events are intensifying faster and they are becoming more complex.

That requires earlier warnings and new approaches to response and recovery, he said.

“On a global scale, progress is being made," he added, "but we must do more.”

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The tactical move cost Vivek Goel his chance at appealing, a court decision says.

NZTA warns SH1 northbound from Wayby to Te Hana is heavily congested.

An Oklahoma man firing a gun he bought as a Christmas present has been charged with manslaughter in the US after authorities say a stray bullet left his yard during target practice and fatally struck a neighbour who was sitting on a porch blocks away.

Cody Wayne Adams, 33, was charged on Friday in Stephens County with first-degree manslaughter. He was booked into jail and later released on a US$100,000 ($149,375) bond, court records show.

Stephens County deputies were called to a home north of Comanche on Christmas Day after Sandra Phelps was shot while sitting on the front porch of a home and holding a child, according to a sheriff's affidavit. Witnesses said Phelps said "ouch," and then collapsed.

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Investigators determined Phelps suffered a gunshot wound, and she was pronounced dead about 20 minutes after deputies received the call about the shooting, the affidavit states.

Authorities contacted Adams, who told deputies he had recently bought himself a .45-caliber handgun and had been shooting at a can in his yard, located about 800 metres from where Phelps was shot.

When deputies told Adams they suspected he shot Phelps, "Adams became visibly upset and began to cry," Stephens County Sheriff's Captain Timothy Vann wrote in the affidavit.

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A telephone message left Monday with Adams' attorney, Carl Buckholts, was not immediately returned.

Court records show Adams is scheduled to appear in court on February 25 and was ordered to have no contact with the victim's family.

Oklahoma law defines first-degree manslaughter as a homicide that occurs when perpetrated without a "design to effect death" while a person is engaged in the commission of a misdemeanor.

It is punishable by up to life in prison. Charging documents allege Adams engaged in conduct with a firearm that demonstrated a "conscious disregard for the safety of others," a misdemeanor crime in Oklahoma.

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The child was rescued from the locked car by Fire and Emergency New Zealand staff.

More than a million Australians will receive a cash boost this week.

Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek announced this month that after a new round of indexation, social security payments would increase for Australians receiving youth allowance, Austudy, ABSTUDY, youth disability pension, and carer allowance payments.

The changes will kick in from January 1, 2026.

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A single adult living away from home with no dependents, who receives youth allowance, will see their maximum fortnightly payment increase to $684.20.

Income thresholds for student payments will also increase, as well as the parental income test threshold for Youth Allowance and ABSTUDY.

About 680,000 people receiving the carer allowance will see their payments increase to $162.60 a fortnight.

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This is in addition to carer supplement payments and other social security support that carers may also be receiving.

The complete list of payment rates being indexed on 1 January 2026 can be found on the Department of Social Services website.

"Thanks to indexation, more than one million Aussies balancing study or caring responsibilities will receive a boost to their payments," Plibersek said.

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Warranted officers and volunteers will staff the Lake Ōkāreka boat ramp.

Survivors and families of the victims of a deadly train crash in southern Mexico are demanding answers as the government vowed to investigate what caused a train to derail on a line connecting the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

Thirteen people, including a teenager, died when the Interoceanic Train linking the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz — with 250 people on board — went off the rails on Sunday (Monday AEST) as it passed by a curve near a town in Oaxaca. Nearly 110 people were injured.

Videos from the scene show train cars that had fallen off the side of a steep hill into dense jungle below as other cars lay toppled on their side.

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In 2023, Mexico's then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador inaugurated the train line as part of a government push to expand the railway and connectivity in rural swaths of Mexico. Hic critics noted that many of the president's infrastructure projects were quickly constructed, often dodging regulatory bureaucracy and environmental impact studies.

López Obrador's ally and successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum, told reporters she was heading to the region and that the train and the infrastructure had been working correctly.

“Our first priority is taking care of the victims," she said. “The second is rigorously investigate what caused this accident.”

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A family's despair

Hector Serrano Garcia, whose 15-year-old daughter Luisa was killed in the crash, was overcome with grief as he gathered with family members in a small funeral home in Oaxaca.

Carmen García, Luisa's grandmother who was also on the train, begged on Sunday night on social media for help in finding her granddaughter.

“We haven't been able to find her anywhere,” the grandmother said. “Please, everyone, touch your hearts, it's my granddaughter.”

Serrano Garcia said the family received the tragic news that Luisa was killed on Monday.

“We’ve had very little information," he said. “It's been incredibly hard for all the families.”

‘It was going very fast’

Baldo Enríquez Antonio said his wife, Ana Guadalupe Fabre, and their 16-year-old son were both on the train, returning home to Veracruz after spending Christmas with relatives in Oaxaca.

They told him the train “was going very fast on the curves,” he said over the phone from a hospital in southern Oaxaca.

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Fabre broke several ribs in the crash and their son hurt his leg and had a gash on his forehead where he suffered a bad cut, Enríquez Antonio told The Associated Press.

Despite his own injuries, their son pulled his mother out of their toppled train car.

When asked about the speed of the train, Sheinbaum said she had seen videos of survivors talking about the speed but warned that “we shouldn’t speculate” but let the "prosecutors do their job.”

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Weeks after blocking anyone aged under 16 from social media, Australia is also in the middle of another online safety crackdown in an attempt to protect young people from the potential harms of AI chatbots, but some experts say it should go even further.

As the artificial intelligence industry continues to develop rapidly, many teenagers have become more reliant on the technology in their day-to-day lives.

Melbourne high school teacher Matthew Micallef has noticed the shift, saying he has seen literacy rates dramatically worsen since the boom.

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"Outside of academic authenticity, students are opting into an 'easy way out' mentality towards their learning," Micallef said. 

"Also, schools are spending a considerable amount of money and funding on eSafety workshops for students that could be better spent on other endeavours."

There is a growing concern that kids may begin to rely too much on artificial intelligence, particularly chatbots, following the absence of social media on their phones.

"We know that kids are already using AI tools, whether that's talking to ChatGPT or companion apps that are actually sort of designed to make friends with people," director of the Centre for Human-AI Information Environments Professor Lisa Given said.

"We know that there are people who get really taken in by the way that those systems engage with us.

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"These systems are trained to respond in that very human way, and that means people can get entranced into thinking that there's a human in the machine or that the machine is listening to and understanding what you're saying.

"That means that companion apps in particular, that are designed to make friends with you and build a relationship, have the potential for significant harm for vulnerable people, and that includes kids."

Australia recently rolled out new restrictions for AI bots, limiting the type of content they can provide teenagers.

"We're the only country in the world that will be tackling AI chatbots and AI companions," eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told 9News in early December. 

"They will be prevented from serving any pornographic, sexually explicit, self-harm, suicidal ideation or disordered eating (content) to under-18s."

Given says the chatbots are hazardous for vulnerable people.

"What we've certainly seen around the world is that there are people who will listen to what these systems are telling them and take it to heart," she said.

"So if a system says to you, 'that's a really great idea, you should totally pursue that', it gives a boost to our ego, and we think someone's listening.

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"But we've seen that sometimes that goes to a very dark place, particularly if people start saying to the system, I'm really depressed, or I'm having really horrible feelings, or I'm thinking about suicide.

"We see that some of those apps are actually responding in ways that encourage that thinking rather than trying to respond to a person and push them towards getting help.

"That means people who are very vulnerable, who are already at risk, can actually be really taken down to a dark hole by these computers."

Micallef believes that teens should not have access to AI chatbots entirely, mostly because of the safety risk they pose.

"With some of the concerns outlined by the eSafety Commissioner, such as access to pornographic, graphic or self-harm content, it would not be wise to give impressionable teenagers the ability to utilise such applications," he said.

Given thinks the restrictions should go even further so to protect everyone, not just teenagers – although conceded any such regulation would be difficult to enact.

"These systems are not just harmful to children," she said.

"We know we've got evidence of adults that also get entranced by these systems, for anyone that is particularly vulnerable, or has existing mental health issues, that's a huge concern.

"If it's safe for adults, it should be safe for kids."

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