Record heat sets the tone for year's searing headlines

When a devastating heat wave hit India this year, it killed more than 2,500 people and melted the pavement of New Delhi's streets. In California, where an ordinary year sees mountain snow pile 1.83 meters deep or more supplying much drinking water surveyors had nothing to measure in some spots but bare grass.
By the time 2015 is over, it is certain to go down as the warmest year on record. But if the heat was unsettling, it also set the tone for many of the headlines that defined the year, even when they ranged far beyond matters of extreme weather or changing climate.

From searing tragedies to blistering campaign rhetoric to boiling crises, the top news of 2015 made for one of the hottest years in recent memory, literally and figuratively.
In a year that visited carnage upon worshippers who opened their church to a stranger in Charleston, South Carolina, and fans who gathered on a Friday night for a rock concert in the center of Paris, the news left the public with little refuge.
Headlines spotlighting bloody clashes for control of Syria and the angry debate over whether to take in those fleeing the violence, radiated heat, but often not much light.

Instead, many of the year's biggest news stories fueled a narrative of intensifying conflict.

It began just days into the new year, when two brothers who called themselves members of al-Qaida forced their way in to the offices of Paris humor magazine Charlie Hebdo and a nearby Jewish market, gunning down 17.
"Our great and beautiful France will never break, will never yield, will never bend," President Francois Hollande told those gathered days later to honor two police officers killed in the assault. But by year's end, France was hardly alone in its vulnerability.
In the US, the tensions of the old year bled into the new one. In Baltimore, the April death of Freddie Gray, a black man tossed in the back of a van by police officers, set off rioting whose destruction echoed that in Ferguson, Missouri, the previous year.

In North Charleston, South Carolina, Tulsa and Chicago, police shootings of black men prompted resignations and indictments. A protest at the University of Missouri over racial discrimination forced the departure of the school's president.
In June, a young man invited into a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, opened fire, killing nine. The shooter was white. All the victims, including the congregation's pastor, were black, killed in an attack police said was motivated by racial hatred.