Latest news with #FatherChristmas
Sydney Morning Herald
5 days ago
- Sport
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘I was nervous': Peake speaks about playing with Mickelson
Shooting six over in your first round of a major was not how Australian Ryan Peake saw things panning out on Thursday at Portrush. He jokingly referred to himself as 'Father Christmas', that he just kept giving the golf course mistakes wrapped as presents. But a five-hour walk with six-time major winner Phil Mickelson, who gifted him a golf ball and signed his glove for him was an experience he will never forget. The convicted ex-bikie gang member, who spent five years in a WA prison for assault, has been one of the most talked about players in the tournament in the build up to the 153rd Open Championship, such is the intrigue in his story from media outlets around the planet. But the former New Zealand Open winner who, like Mickelson, is a left-hander, admitted to being desperately disappointed in his opening round, which included eight bogeys and two birdies. When he was asked about the experience of playing with Phil, however, it put a smile on his face. 'It was pretty good. I just asked for his golf ball and got him to sign a golf glove for me after. 'I know everyone is going to look at it and say you take the experience in and stuff like that, but obviously very disappointed with the round. Not what I want. So pretty flat at the moment. Was pretty flat out there as well. I just got beat up out there.
The Age
5 days ago
- Sport
- The Age
‘I was nervous': Peake speaks about playing with Mickelson
Shooting six over in your first round of a major was not how Australian Ryan Peake saw things panning out on Thursday at Portrush. He jokingly referred to himself as 'Father Christmas', that he just kept giving the golf course mistakes wrapped as presents. But a five-hour walk with six-time major winner Phil Mickelson, who gifted him a golf ball and signed his glove for him was an experience he will never forget. The convicted ex-bikie gang member, who spent five years in a WA prison for assault, has been one of the most talked about players in the tournament in the build up to the 153rd Open Championship, such is the intrigue in his story from media outlets around the planet. But the former New Zealand Open winner who, like Mickelson, is a left-hander, admitted to being desperately disappointed in his opening round, which included eight bogeys and two birdies. When he was asked about the experience of playing with Phil, however, it put a smile on his face. 'It was pretty good. I just asked for his golf ball and got him to sign a golf glove for me after. 'I know everyone is going to look at it and say you take the experience in and stuff like that, but obviously very disappointed with the round. Not what I want. So pretty flat at the moment. Was pretty flat out there as well. I just got beat up out there.
Metro
6 days ago
- Climate
- Metro
Santa's village in the Arctic Circle is hotter than the UK today
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video If anyone needs a clear example of the existence of climate change, this is it. The town of Rovaniemi in Finland, located within the Arctic Circle, is currently experiencing a heatwave. Finns are flocking to the beach to soak up the sun as temperatures have reached highs of 31°C in the Arctic Circle – very different to its usual status as a festive wonderland. Santa's elves and reindeers will be sweating in Father Christmas's workshop, as the town's Santa Claus Village showed the temperature on a digital display. While the weather will of course be warmer in mid-July compared to the Christmas period, normally northern Finland only reaches up to about 20°C in the summer months. Locals certainly weren't expecting the warm weather, with Rovaniemi resident Toivo Koivu saying:It's pretty good. I like it. It's hot. I don't think it's this hot too often here. 'I was on vacation for a few weeks going down through Europe with Interrail with a few of my buddies and it was very hot and we thought that when we would come back to Finland it would be cooler like normally, but no, it's actually the same weather as down south.' Thermostats hitting 30°C is pretty rare within the Arctic Circle, but the phenomenon is becoming increasingly common. According to a study published in the journal Nature, last summer was exceptionally warm in northern Scandinavia and Finland, breaking the June to August record set in 1937. Finland as a whole is experiencing a heatwave at the moment, with its hottest temperature of the summer so far recorded on Monday at 32.4°C. The country's meteorological office warned the heatwave is expected to continue throughout the rest of the week, although southern areas were drenched by a strong thunderstorm and heavy rain earlier this week. Heatwaves are triggered in Finland when daily average temperatures reach 20°C or the country experiences highs of 27°C. More Trending The bulk of the country, aside from a handful of southern regions, is under a yellow heatwave or wildfire warning, with a few coastal regions facing yellow warnings for high winds. While the UK isn't currently in a heatwave, we have seen three heatwaves practically back-to-back, and generally speaking we see warmer temperatures than Finland as we're closer to the equator. Today, however, The Met Office reckons London is the hottest part of the UK, reaching around 25°C, with the rest of the country in the low 20s. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Is it safe to travel to Iceland right now? Latest advice after volcano erupts MORE: How to make a drought-resistant garden because hosepipe bans aren't going anywhere MORE: Pupils hold 'wearing shorts matters' protest in sweltering heatwave
New Straits Times
15-07-2025
- New Straits Times
#NST180years: Transformed by a powerful evolution
ON the production floor of the New Straits Times in the late 1980s, "paste-up men" wielding razor-sharp box cutters and straight aluminium rulers would cut strips of wax-coated bromide paper with the speed and precision of a CNC machine, before placing them on layout sheets. The production editor — a picture of calm — would pace between rows of brightly lit layout tables, arms folded, one eye scanning the pages, the other cocked on his Seiko timepiece, as sub-editors scurried about making last-minute changes. The finished pages would be laid out on the offstone table. Editors and production supervisors did the last checks, signed off the pages and declared them "offstoned" — no more changes and ready for the plate. Today, everything is digitally done through the magic of ones and zeros. The paste-up men, their box cutters, bromide paper, wax baths and layout tables have become ghosts of a bygone era. Word-processing and editing were done on Kodak's ATEX machines — cast-iron framed keyboards with high-impact plastic key tabs. Trash bins overflowed with torn carbon paper, crumpled foolscap sheets and reams of typewriter ribbons. The newsroom pulsed with the syncopated, clackety-clack sing-song of Olivetti typewriters as reporters raced to meet their deadlines. These days, fingers dance effortlessly across keyboards and smartphones. Data is stored digitally, captured on vast servers. Stories can be tweaked, tracked and kept for months. Editors can also see how stories perform on the World Wide Web in real time. If they are sluggish, they can be taken down, rewritten and re-sold — something impossible with traditional print. If you covered crime back then, you'd do the rounds — morgues, hospitals, fire and police stations — to build contacts. People skills mattered, and you were bound to get scoops if you showed up with a roll of free NSTs under your arm and spread them around like Father Christmas... more so if you arrived with teh O ais, ikat tepi, and roti canai. In Balai Berita, a crime reporter monitored the wireless set that picked up police transmissions. The NST crime boys were often ahead of the game, showing up at crime scenes long before the competition. Bukit Aman's ruffled feathers would be soothed by the imposing crime editor, Rudy Beltran, himself a retired cop and an accomplished pianist. Today, the proliferation of WhatsApp groups has made wireless sets irrelevant. Information moves at the speed of thought. Newsrooms no longer wait for dispatches crackling over the radio or rely on runners dashing in with scribbled updates. Details, photos and videos arrive instantly, often before official confirmation. On the flipside, scoops — the lifeblood of newspapers — have become harder to secure. When everyone shares everything in group chats, exclusivity is lost. A tip-off that once landed on a single editor's desk now reaches dozens of reporters at the same time. The playing field has levelled, but at the cost of the thrill of the hunt. Technology has democratised information — but it has also made genuine exclusives rarer. Today, journalists armed with a smartphone can write and edit a story, take high-definition photos, record a stand-upper and send a complete package back to the newsroom, each piece tailored for specific platforms — print, online and social media. A photographer with a DSLR smaller than a lunch box can shoot thousands of high-resolution images and broadcast-quality 4K videos. Where it once took a team from different departments to assemble a story, now a good reporter can do it alone. This seismic shift began in the mid-2000s with the digital age. The Internet, once shackled by anaemic dial-up speeds and anorexic bandwidth, became unstoppable. The NST had the answer in this powerful new tool, begging the question — how to fully harness it. Far from being just an enabler, digital technology was a game-changer. It allowed the NST to evolve into a fully integrated news organisation, covering a broad spectrum — from traditional print to online, social media, podcasts, education and television. In so doing, it has become more than just a newspaper — it has grown into one of the world's largest repositories of human history. And it continues to reinvent itself, reshaping how we consume news and information. Some practices have been consigned to the scrap heap of history. But certain things — like the chase for a scoop, the ironclad commitment to ethics and integrity, the hunt for that perfect money shot — still continue to this day, 180 years later.
Daily Mirror
09-07-2025
- Daily Mirror
TUI launches holidays to ‘Lapland alternative' that's 'as magic' for families
TUI has launched package trips to Finland's Arctic Lakeland region, served by a twice-weekly Manchester–Kajaani service. TUI said the addition would meet demand for traditional Lapland holidays, which 'consistently sell out year after year" TUI will be jetting festive fans to the top of Finland this Christmas. In recent years, there has been a boom in demand for Lapland, with more and more parents whisking their kids up north for the chance to meet Father Christmas himself. Given the exact home address of the big man in red is not made publicly available—and the fact that Lapland stretches across Norway, Sweden, and Finland—a number of different snow-caked locations vie for the Christmas tourist pound. Levi, Pallas, and Ylläs are popular for skiing and winter activities and compete with Finnish Lapland's capital, Rovaniemi, to be known as the centre of the yuletide-focused region. Rovaniemi in particular has seen its visitor numbers boom of late. The winter-themed park, located on the edge of the Arctic Circle and famous for its claim as the 'official hometown of Santa Claus,' now attracts more than 600,000 visitors annually. During the holiday season, visitors exceed the town's population by more than tenfold. Keen to tap into the trend, TUI has now launched package trips to Finland's Arctic Lakeland region, served by a twice-weekly Manchester–Kajaani service. TUI said the addition would meet demand for traditional Lapland holidays, which 'consistently sell out year after year.' 'Arctic Lakeland offers everything families love about a Finnish Christmas experience, from husky sledding and reindeer rides to personal Santa meetings, but in a more intimate setting from £1,000 per person,' said TUI. Arctic Lakeland is located in the centre of Finland—south of Lapland—but shares many of the same winter wonderland qualities that make the more northern region so popular. 'You'll want to bring your camera, because the scenery here's in a league of its own. The lakes are glassy with a sapphire-tinted glow, and the dramatic mountains that mark the horizon are topped with clusters of pine trees. A thick layer of snow that looks like icing powder blankets the landscape in the colder months, transforming the resort into a winter wonderland,' TUI tempts on its website. READ MORE: 'Secret card' ultra-rich use to avoid flying with the public - and how they get it READ MORE: Couple find 'Maldives of Scotland' beach after taking detour on hiking holiday 'As the name suggests, this resort's an adventure playground for snow sports enthusiasts, with chalk-white pistes, toboggan slides, and snowshoeing routes galore. Vuokatti's a particularly great spot for skiers—it has 14 slopes carved into picturesque landscapes, and different options for people of all skill levels. You can also chase a glimpse of the Northern Lights when the sun goes down, and have pinch-me experiences like snowmobiling tours and husky sled rides. 'Naturally, Arctic Lakeland comes to life at Christmastime—Finland is the home of Santa Claus, after all. When you visit in the festive season, you'll have the chance to meet the man himself, along with his helpers and reindeer. Sleigh rides are on the cards too, and you can bake gingerbread cookies and go Christmas carolling. That's not to mention hours of fun in the snow, making snowmen and snow angels. If anywhere will get you into the Christmas spirit, it's here.'
