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Australia’s New Youngest Senator Elected at 21 with Unexpected Win 

In this image made from video, newly elected Australian Senator Charlotte Walker speaks during an interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp., in Adelaide, Australia, Monday, May 26, 2025. (Australian Broadcasting Corp. via AP) 
In this image made from video, newly elected Australian Senator Charlotte Walker speaks during an interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp., in Adelaide, Australia, Monday, May 26, 2025. (Australian Broadcasting Corp. via AP) 
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Australia’s New Youngest Senator Elected at 21 with Unexpected Win 

In this image made from video, newly elected Australian Senator Charlotte Walker speaks during an interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp., in Adelaide, Australia, Monday, May 26, 2025. (Australian Broadcasting Corp. via AP) 
In this image made from video, newly elected Australian Senator Charlotte Walker speaks during an interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp., in Adelaide, Australia, Monday, May 26, 2025. (Australian Broadcasting Corp. via AP) 

A woman who turned 21 on the day of Australia’s federal election in May has been declared the nation’s youngest ever senator.

And like many female candidates who run for election in Australia, Charlotte Walker wasn’t expected to win.

The former union official won the governing center-left Labor Party’s third Senate seat for South Australia state in a complicated rank order voting system. A party's third choice rarely wins.

She had the lowest vote count of the six newly elected senators for the state. The Australian Electoral Commission officially declared the poll Tuesday.

The new job will be a "big adjustment," said Walker, who starts her six-year term July 1. A federal lawmaker’s base salary is more than 205,000 Australian dollars ($133,000) annually.

"There’s a few feelings. Obviously, there’s a lot of pressure," Walker told Australian Broadcasting Corp. after the results were announced late Monday.

"I want to do a good job for South Australians, but I also want to show young people, particularly young women, that this is achievable and this is something that they can do also. I’m also really excited. Not many people my age get to ... go to Canberra and have the ability to contribute in the way that I will," she added.

Before Walker, the youngest senator was Jordon Steele-John of the Greens party, who was elected for Western Australia state in 2017 at the age of 23.

Australia's youngest-ever federal lawmaker was Wyatt Roy, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2010 at the age of 20. He lasted two three-year terms before he was voted out of his Queensland state seat.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese expects 57% of Labor lawmakers in the Senate and House of Representatives will be women when the new Parliament first sits on July 22. The proportion of women was 52% during Albanese’s first term in government.

Australian governments usually lose seats in their second term. Albanese leads the first federal government not to lose a single seat at an election since 1966. Labor is expected to hold 94 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives, up from 78 in the last Parliament.

Australian National University political historian Frank Bongiorno said unexpected swings can put women candidates into Parliament after seeking apparently unwinnable seats.

But Bongiorno said Labor had been working on increasing women’s representation since the party introduced a quota in 1994 that stated 35% of candidates in winnable seats had to be female.

"The fact that we now have not 50%, but 57% is partly a function of obviously just the size of the swing, but it is also, I think, very deliberate changes that have occurred within the Labor Party over about 30 years from what was a very male-dominated culture and environment," Bongiorno said.

The odds had been stacked against Walker being elected as her party's third choice in South Australia, Bongiorno said.

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Varieties

Former Flight Attendant Posed as Pilot, Received Hundreds of Free Flights, US Authorities Say

A United Airlines plane takes off from San Francisco International Airport on January 20, 2026 in San Francisco, California. (Getty Images/AFP)
A United Airlines plane takes off from San Francisco International Airport on January 20, 2026 in San Francisco, California. (Getty Images/AFP)
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Former Flight Attendant Posed as Pilot, Received Hundreds of Free Flights, US Authorities Say

A United Airlines plane takes off from San Francisco International Airport on January 20, 2026 in San Francisco, California. (Getty Images/AFP)
A United Airlines plane takes off from San Francisco International Airport on January 20, 2026 in San Francisco, California. (Getty Images/AFP)

A former flight attendant for a Canadian airline posed as a commercial pilot and as a current flight attendant to obtain hundreds of free flights from US airlines, authorities said.

Dallas Pokornik, 33, of Toronto, was arrested in Panama after being indicted on wire fraud charges in federal court in Hawaii last October. He pleaded not guilty Tuesday following his extradition.

According to court documents, Pokornik was a flight attendant for a Toronto-based airline from 2017 to 2019, then used fake employee identification from that carrier to obtain tickets reserved for pilots and flight attendants on three other airlines.

US prosecutors said Tuesday that Pokornik even requested to sit in an extra seat in the cockpit — the “jump seat” — typically reserved for off-duty pilots. It was not clear from court documents whether he ever actually rode in a plane’s cockpit, and the US Attorney’s Office declined to say.

The indictment did not identify the airlines except to say they are based in Honolulu, Chicago and Fort Worth, Texas. Representatives for Hawaiian Airlines, United Airlines and American Airlines — which are respectively based in those cities — didn’t immediately respond to emails from The Associated Press seeking comment.

Air Canada, which is based in Toronto, also did not respond to an email seeking comment.

The scheme lasted four years, the US prosecutors in Hawaii said.

A US magistrate judge on Tuesday ordered Pokornik to remain in custody. His federal defender declined to comment.

In 2023, an off-duty airline pilot riding in the cockpit of a Horizon Air flight said “I’m not OK” just before trying to cut the engines midflight. That pilot, Joseph Emerson, later told police he had been struggling with depression.

A federal judge sentenced him to time served last November.

The allegations against Pokornik are reminiscent of “Catch Me If You Can,” the movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio that tells the story of Frank Abagnale posing as a pilot to defraud an airline and obtain free flights.

Varieties

Wave of Low Temperature Brings Rare Snowfall to Shanghai

A woman holding an umbrella rides a bicycle amid snowfall in Shanghai, China January 20, 2026. (Reuters)
A woman holding an umbrella rides a bicycle amid snowfall in Shanghai, China January 20, 2026. (Reuters)
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Wave of Low Temperature Brings Rare Snowfall to Shanghai

A woman holding an umbrella rides a bicycle amid snowfall in Shanghai, China January 20, 2026. (Reuters)
A woman holding an umbrella rides a bicycle amid snowfall in Shanghai, China January 20, 2026. (Reuters)

A wave of low temperature sweeping southern China brought rare snowfall to ​Shanghai on Tuesday, delighting residents of the financial hub as authorities warned that the frigid weather could last for at least three days.

The city, on China's east coast, last ‌experienced a heavy snowfall ‌in January ‌2018. ⁠And ​just ‌last week, Shanghai basked in unusually high temperatures of 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit), which local media said had caused some osmanthus trees to bloom.

"The weather seems rather ⁠strange this year," said 30-year-old resident Yu Xin.

"In ‌general, the temperature ‍fluctuations have ‍been quite significant, so some people ‍might feel a bit uncomfortable," she said.

Chinese state media said other areas experienced sharp temperature drops, including Jiangxi and ​Guizhou provinces, which sit south of China's Yangtze and Huai ⁠rivers. Guizhou province is expected to experience temperature drops of 10 to 14 degrees Celsius, the Zhejiang News reported.

Across China, authorities have also shut 241 sections of major roads in 12 provinces including Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang due to snowfall and icy ‌roads, state broadcaster CCTV said.

Varieties

Researchers Find Antarctic Penguin Breeding Is Heating up Sooner, and That’s a Problem

View of gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) penguins at the Paradise Bay in the Gerlache Strait -which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, on January 20, 2024. (AFP)
View of gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) penguins at the Paradise Bay in the Gerlache Strait -which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, on January 20, 2024. (AFP)
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Researchers Find Antarctic Penguin Breeding Is Heating up Sooner, and That’s a Problem

View of gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) penguins at the Paradise Bay in the Gerlache Strait -which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, on January 20, 2024. (AFP)
View of gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) penguins at the Paradise Bay in the Gerlache Strait -which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, on January 20, 2024. (AFP)

Warming temperatures are forcing Antarctic penguins to breed earlier and that's a big problem for two of the cute tuxedoed species that face extinction by the end of the century, a study said.

With temperatures in the breeding ground increasing 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) from 2012 to 2022, three different penguin species are beginning their reproductive process about two weeks earlier than the decade before, according to a study in Tuesday's Journal of Animal Ecology. And that sets up potential food problems for young chicks.

“Penguins are changing the time at which they’re breeding at a record speed, faster than any other vertebrate,” said lead author Ignacio Juarez Martinez, a biologist at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. "And this is important because the time at which you breed needs to coincide with the time with most resources in the environment and this is mostly food for your chicks so they have enough to grow.''

For some perspective, scientists have studied changes in the life cycle of great tits, a European bird. They found a similar two-week change, but that took 75 years as opposed to just 10 years for these three penguin species, said study co-author Fiona Suttle, another Oxford biologist.

Researchers used remote control cameras to photograph penguins breeding in dozens of colonies from 2011 to 2021. They say it was the fastest shift in timing of life cycles for any backboned animals that they have seen. The three species are all brush-tailed, so named because their tails drag on the ice: the cartoon-eye Adelie, the black-striped chinstrap and the fast-swimming gentoo.

Suttle said climate change is creating winners and losers among these three penguin species and it happens at a time in the penguin life cycle where food and the competition for it are critical in survival.

The Adelie and chinstrap penguins are specialists, eating mainly krill. The gentoo have a more varied diet. They used to breed at different times, so there were no overlaps and no competition. But the gentoos' breeding has moved earlier faster than the other two species and now there's overlap. That's a problem because gentoos, which don't migrate as far as the other two species, are more aggressive in finding food and establishing nesting areas, Martinez and Suttle said.

Suttle said she has gone back in October and November to the same colony areas where she used to see Adelies in previous years only to find their nests replaced by gentoos. And the data backs up the changes her eyes saw, she said.

“Chinstraps are declining globally,” Martinez said. “Models show that they might get extinct before the end of the century at this rate. Adelies are doing very poorly in the Antarctic Peninsula and it’s very likely that they go extinct from the Antarctic Peninsula before the end of the century.”

Martinez theorized that the warming western Antarctic — the second-fasting heating place on Earth behind only the Arctic North Atlantic — means less sea ice. Less sea ice means more spores coming out earlier in the Antarctic spring and then “you have this incredible bloom of phytoplankton,” which is the basis of the food chain that eventually leads to penguins, he said. And it's happening earlier each year.

Not only do the chinstraps and Adelies have more competition for food from gentoos because of the warming and changes in plankton and krill, but the changes have brought more commercial fishing that comes earlier and that further shortens the supply for the penguins, Suttle said.

This shift in breeding timing “is an interesting signal of change and now it’s important to continuing observing these penguin populations to see if these changes have negative impacts on their populations,” said Michelle LaRue, a professor of Antarctic marine science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. She was not part of the Oxford study.

With millions of photos — taken every hour by 77 cameras for 10 years — scientists enlisted everyday people to help tag breeding activity using the Penguin Watch website.

“We’ve had over 9 million of our images annotated via Penguin Watch,” Suttle said. “A lot of that does come down to the fact that people just love penguins so much. They’re very cute. They’re on all the Christmas cards. People say, ‘Oh, they look like little waiters in tuxedos.’”

“The Adelies, I think their personality goes along with it as well,” Suttle said, saying there's “perhaps a kind of cheekiness about them — and this very cartoon-like eye that does look like it’s just been drawn on.”