Liam Payne’s girlfriend has said his death was a “tragic accident” and he was in “such a good headspace” when she left him in Argentina.

Kate Cassidy was with Payne in Buenos Aires but flew back to the US days before the One Direction star was killed in a fall from a hotel balcony.

She told The Sun: “Love is so optimistic, and you just hope that everything will work out at the end.

“Obviously if I knew, if I could see into the future, I would never have left Argentina.”

The American influencer said she had to get back to look after the couple’s dog, Nala.

“I had a responsibility, we had a responsibility. We had our dog and obviously I never, ever thought this event would occur,” she said.

Cassidy added: “It was a tragic accident and no, I never did think [he might die young]. But, you know, we did have our own separate lives – this wasn’t the first time we have travelled separately.

“I just never thought this would have happened, that it would turn out the way it did.”

Payne died aged 31 on 16 October from multiple injuries after falling from the third floor of a hotel in the Argentine capital.

Three people have been charged with manslaughter over his death, and two with supplying cocaine.

Cassidy, 25, said she thinks about Payne “every second of every day” and that she’d had a “childhood crush” on him since she was 10.

The pair got together in 2022 and she told The Sun it still doesn’t seem “fully real for me that he’s not here”.

“From the moment I met Liam, I genuinely believed we were soulmates,” said Cassidy.

“He was the most humble, charming, normal person you could ever hope to come across, and genuinely one of the best people I’ve ever met in my life.”

She said the Wolverhampton-born singer “was in such a good headspace” when she left Argentina.

“We were in such a great place, just full of love; he was so happy and positive. And I just can’t even believe the way things truly ended,” she said.

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Cassidy said she was glad she didn’t discover he’d died via social media, revealing one of Payne’s friends had called her to break the news.

“That moment, it’s like blank; it’s blacked out in my head,” she added.

“I didn’t believe it at first. I thought it was just a rumour. Or something that somebody made up just to get views.”

Payne’s funeral took place in November in Buckinghamshire, with his former bandmates and ex-partner Cheryl among the mourners.

Last month was the warmest January on record, according to new data.

The finding has baffled scientists, who had expected changes in ocean currents in the Pacific to take the edge off rising global temperatures.

Figures released by the European Copernicus climate service show average temperatures around the world in January were 1.75C warmer than before greenhouse gas emissions started to rise significantly in the industrial revolution around 150 years ago.

That’s 0.1C above the record set last January. And it comes after a year in which temperatures topped 1.5C, the target for climate negotiations, for the first time.

Dr Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, warned that the rising pace of climate change would increase the risk of extreme weather and its consequences.

“This January is the hottest on record because countries are still burning huge amounts of oil, gas and coal,” she said.

“The Los Angeles wildfires were a stark reminder that we have already reached an incredibly dangerous level of warming. We’ll see many more unprecedented extreme weather events in 2025.”

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January had been expected to be slightly cooler than last year because of a natural shift in weather patterns and ocean currents in the Pacific, called La Nina.

But that hasn’t been enough to slow the upward trend in temperatures.

‘Frankly terrifying’

Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical & climate hazards at UCL, said: “The fact that the latest robust Copernicus data reveals the January just gone was the hottest on record – despite an emerging La Nina, which typically has a cooling effect – is both astonishing and, frankly terrifying.

“Having crashed through the 1.5C limit in 2024, the climate is showing no signs of wanting to dip under it again, reflected by the fact that this is the 18th of the last 19 months to see the global temperature rise since pre-industrial times top 1.5C.

“On the basis of the Valencia floods and apocalyptic LA wildfires, I don’t think there can be any doubt that dangerous, all-pervasive, climate breakdown has arrived.”

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The consequences of a warming atmosphere are also being directly felt in the UK, with more intense rainfall increasing the risk of surface flooding.

The Environment Agency released figures in December showing 4.6 million properties in England are at risk from flooding as drainage systems are overwhelmed by rainfall. That’s a 43% increase on previous estimates.

But adapting to a climate change is hugely expensive.

The government on Wednesday announced it would spend £2.65bn over two years to shore up existing flood defences and protect an extra 52,000 homes and businesses – a tiny fraction of the number at risk.

Ancient scrolls charred by a volcanic eruption 2,000 years ago may finally be starting to reveal their secrets.

UK scientists say they have made a historic breakthrough in their efforts to decipher the artefacts – with the assistance of AI.

Hundreds of papyrus scrolls were found in the 1750s in the remains of a lavish villa at the Roman town of Herculaneum, which along with nearby Pompeii was destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79AD.

While the heat and ash from the volcano was catastrophic for the town, it preserved the scrolls – though in an unreadable state.

Scholars and scientists have been working for more than 250 years on ways to decipher the scrolls, which are too fragile to be unrolled physically.

In 2023, several tech executives sponsored the “Vesuvius Challenge” competition, offering cash prizes for efforts to decipher the scrolls with technology.

On Wednesday, the challenge announced a “historic breakthrough,” saying researchers had managed to generate the first image of the inside of one of the three scrolls held at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.

University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales, co-founder of the challenge, said the organisers were “thrilled with the successful imaging of this scroll”, saying it “contains more recoverable text than we have ever seen in a scanned Herculaneum scroll”.

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The scroll was scanned by Diamond Light Source, a lab in Harwell, near Oxford, by using a particle accelerator known as a synchrotron to create an intensely powerful X-ray.

AI was then used to piece together the images, searching for ink that reveals where writing is located. A 3D image of the scroll can then be formulated that allows experts to unroll it virtually.

Little of the text has been deciphered so far. One of the few words that has been made out is the ancient Greek for “disgust”.

Peter Toth, a curator at the Bodleian Library, said: “We need better images, and they are very positive and very, very confident that they can still improve the image quality and the legibility of the text.

“And then don’t forget that there is like 1,000 more scrolls in Naples.”