World leaders gathered at the annual climate summit have reached a historic agreement on new emissions reduction targets. The landmark deal commits participating nations to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, with intermediate targets set for 2030 and 2040.

The agreement, which took three weeks of negotiations, includes binding commitments from 140 countries and creates a new international monitoring body to track progress. It also establishes a $500 billion climate finance fund to support developing nations.

Environmental groups praised the deal as a major step forward, though some scientists cautioned that the 2050 target may not be ambitious enough to prevent the most severe effects of climate change.

World leaders gathered at the annual climate summit have reached a historic agreement on new emissions reduction targets. The landmark deal commits participating nations to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, with intermediate targets set for 2030 and 2040.

The agreement includes binding commitments from 140 countries and creates a new international monitoring body to track progress, along with a $500 billion climate finance fund.

A research team has unveiled an AI model that exhibits unprecedented reasoning capabilities, successfully solving complex multi-step problems across mathematics, science, and legal analysis — performance that rivals top human experts in several domains.

The model, trained on a novel architecture that mimics the brain's ability to form abstract concepts, scored in the 95th percentile on standardised graduate-level exams. Unlike previous systems, it can explain its reasoning step by step and identify gaps in its own knowledge.

Critics caution that benchmark performance doesn't always translate to real-world reliability, but researchers say early deployments in drug discovery and climate modelling have already yielded promising results.

A sweeping new data privacy bill under review in multiple jurisdictions would require companies to obtain explicit consent before collecting behavioural data, dramatically limiting the targeted advertising practices that underpin the digital economy.

The legislation, modelled loosely on Europe's GDPR but with stricter enforcement mechanisms, would apply to any company with more than 10,000 users. Penalties for non-compliance could reach 4% of global annual revenue, with personal liability for executives in egregious cases.

Industry groups argue the rules would stifle innovation and hurt small businesses disproportionately. Consumer advocates counter that the current system — where users routinely trade sensitive data for free services — is fundamentally broken and long overdue for reform.