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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
National
Tony Harper

Afternoon Update: BoM’s El Niño prediction; academic used AI to write op-ed; and gen Z’s fear of being cringe

The sun rises over dried up lake Pamamaroo, outside of Menindee, Australia
The sun rises over dried up lake Pamamaroo, outside of Menindee, Australia. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/Reuters

Good afternoon.

Australia should prepare for an imminent El Niño, with the Bureau of Meteorology and other agencies forecasting that the weather phenomenon is likely to develop in the coming months.

“The models are really aligning now,” Felicity Gamble, a senior BoM climatologist, said. “We are expecting a transition to El Niño sometime during winter.”

The World Meteorological Organization said on Tuesday there was a 90% chance of an El Niño developing in the Pacific before November – a phenomenon that historically has increased the likelihood of hotter and drier conditions for Australia’s east.

El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (Enso), one of the key drivers affecting global climate. During an El Niño, sea surface temperatures in a central region of the equatorial Pacific become warmer than average, resulting in a shift in atmospheric circulation.

Top news

In pictures


In Kyiv’s northern residential suburb of Vynohradar – a district of modest apartment blocks – residents were quietly and calmly getting on with salvaging, clearing and dealing with what remained of their apartments after Monday night’s massive missile attack on their city. Dozens of rockets and hundreds of drones had been let loose on the city, leaving five people dead.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has escalated Moscow’s air campaign in recent weeks in an apparent attempt to take advantage of Ukraine’s shortage of US-made air defence systems – exacerbated by the Iran war – and convince an increasingly pessimistic audience at home that Moscow is prevailing in the four-year war.

What they said …

***

“She’s murdering 60 Minutes. She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.” – Former 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley on CBS News chief, Bari Weiss.

Scott Pelley, one of the most well-known and respected journalists in broadcast journalism, was fired after clashing with network brass over last week’s severe round of cuts at 60 Minutes, the show he has worked on since 2004, the Guardian confirmed.

CBS News management shocked staffers last week by firing the network’s executive producer, executive editor and two correspondents, Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, without giving a specific reason for their terminations.

Podcast


What’s missing from ‘embarrassing’ Mandelson files? – The Latest

A second tranche of documents related to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador have been released. The documents, running to more than 1,000 pages, were supposed to reveal what ministers knew about Mandelson’s links to Epstein and the security process to approve his appointment, but instead have revealed government infighting and early doubts about Keir Starmer’s premiership.

Listen to the episode here

Before bed read

With the constant risk of being recorded, many young people are afraid of showing enthusiasm – let alone doing something so potentially embarrassing as dancing in public. Is there a way to set themselves free from the fear of being cringe?

Daily word game

Today’s starter word is: MARG. You have five goes to get the longest word including the starter word. Play Wordiply.

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