2020 brought another year of extremes, as fires made way for La Nina
2020 brought another year of extremes, as fires made way for La Nina
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COVID-19 might have made thermometers a hot item in 2020 but the weather did its bit too.
As eastern Australia heads towards a soggy, muggy and stormy end to the year, the climatic contrasts to the start of 2020 could hardly be starker.
Bushfires, smoke, dust and heatwaves greeted eastern Australia as 2020 got under way.
Credit:Nick Moir
As we came off a record year of heat and drought for NSW and Australia as a whole in 2019, we probably weren’t too surprised when Sydney and the state kicked off January with a scorcher.
All Creatures Great And Small: Christmas Special
This drama series about vets in the chocolate-box Yorkshire Dales is first-class comfort viewing (Callum Woodhouse, above)
This drama series about vets in the chocolate-box Yorkshire Dales is first-class comfort viewing. It’s Christmas Eve and James is trying to come to terms with the fact that Helen is marrying Hugh in the morning – although she doesn’t seem very happy about it. Tuesday 22, Channel 5, 9pm
Worzel Gummidge: Saucy Nancy
Viewers of a certain age who recall Jon Pertwee’s Worzel were sceptical about Mackenzie Crook (above) and his reboot, but last Christmas’s two films were a triumph
Louis Talpe (in pink jersey), The Racer Damon Smith
George Clooney and Caoilinn Springall, The Midnight Sky
FILM
THE MIDNIGHT SKY (Cert 12, 122 mins, streaming from December 23 exclusively on Netflix, Sci-Fi/Drama/Action/Romance)
IN FEBRUARY 2049, three weeks after a global catastrophe known as “the event”, scientist Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney) lives out his final days alone at the Barbeau Observatory in the Arctic Circle, one of the few places yet to be choked by dangerously high levels of radiation.
He performs blood transfusions to counter the cancer ravaging his body and awaits the inevitable, until he stumbles upon a young girl named Iris (Caoilinn Springall) left behind in the evacuation.
USA TODAY
The claim: George S. Patton said, Politicians are the lowest form of life on earth. Liberal Democrats are the lowest form of politicians.
A meme dating to 2015, claiming that World War II Gen. George S. Patton expressed disdain for left-wing Democrats, surfaced on Facebook in the days after the November election. It’s already gotten a one-two fact-check punch from Snopes and PolitiFact.
The short answer: There is no evidence that Patton an innovator in the use of tanks in combat ever said this. Snopes found the earliest use of the quote in “The Unknown Patton” by Charles Province, a 1983 book. Province did not use footnotes in his book and said the work was not a biography.