JB at the departure lounge while TF at book launch 🚀 Gift Guide via Fortune: “It’s not quite make-or-break time for holiday shopping, but the clock is already ticking. There are few categories that seem to have something for everyone and are easy to drop in the mail. One of those categories would be books. Now certainly, it’s an overwhelming one. Where to start? If you know your gift receivers well, then you could likely narrow it down to at least a favorite genre and maybe even cross out books you know they’ve read. But books are also a great option for people you don’t know well, especially those touching on food, wine, art, pop culture, entertainment—you get the idea. Here’s a list of new releases this year that could delight readers on your gift list this season…”
"Espionage and foreign interference is insidious. Its effects might not present for decades and by that time it's too late. You wake up one day and find decisions made in our country that are not in the interests of our country," Mr Lewis said
Insidious': Former ASIO boss warns on Chinese interference in Australia
Defecting Chinese spy offers information trove to Australian government - The Age
Defecting Chinese spy offers information trove to Australian government - The Age
As Washington sat entranced this week watching the impeachment hearings of President Trump, his defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, crisscrossed Southeast Asia, conducting a seemingly endless string of diplomatic engagements barely noticed back at home. But there was one common thread throughout it all: rising concern about how to handle an increasingly aggressive and powerful China
From Hanoi to Halifax, everyone is worried about China
Underworld figure faces court after 2017 Dubai arrest over drug ring
The New York Times – The musician and poet released “You Want It Darker” 19 days before his death in 2016. His son, Adam, finished more songs from those sessions for a posthumous album. “The last time Leonard Cohen appeared in public was in mid-October 2016 at a Los Angeles news conference for his 14th studio album, “You Want It Darker,” just a few weeks before his death. Behind him hung a Canadian flag and beside him sat his son, Adam, a musician who had served as producer on the stirring LP. At one point Cohen, stooped and frail but sharp as ever in an impeccably tailored black suit, treated the audience to a recitation from a piece still in progress. He drew a breath, and then in that inimitable baritone, he began:
Listen to the hummingbird
Whose wings you cannot see
Listen to the hummingbird
Don’t listen to me
Whose wings you cannot see
Listen to the hummingbird
Don’t listen to me
The audience applauded, and Cohen — who retreated at the height of his fame to live for five years in a Buddhist monastery — demurred with a characteristically self-abnegating joke: “I would say the hummingbird deserves the royalties on that one.” The interviewer asked if the song would appear on his next album. Said the ailing, 82-year-old Cohen, “G-d willing.” It seems to have been his will. “Listen to the Hummingbird” is the final track on Cohen’s posthumous new album, “Thanks for the Dance,” which will be released on Friday. The raw audio of that passage from the news conference was tracked down by Adam Cohen and the engineer Michael Chaves, who mixed out the buzzing tone of the room’s halogen lights and composed around it a gentle, unobtrusive piano melody. Adam had already done the same for many of the other vocal takes and half-finished songs his father left behind… [this article includes a link to Leonard Cohen – Happens to the Heart (Official Video)]
Reuters: “An obsessive compulsive dog who was abandoned as a puppy has a new mission: helping find and save koalas injured in Australia’s recent devastating bushfires. Bear, a Cattle Dog cross-breed, is trained to find both koalas and quolls, another small Australian marsupial, in the wild. “This is the first year that we have been involved in the fires,” Romane Cristescu, his minder and ecologist at The University of the Sunshine Coast, told Reuters. “It is a bit more dangerous than what we usually do.” Bear, who usually looks for sick or injured wildlife for conservation and research purposes in calmer conditions, has been wearing protective socks on his paws to search through areas scorched by fire.
Bushfires have ravaged around 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) of farmland and bush across Australia’s east coast in recent weeks, killing four people and destroying hundreds of homes. The country’s koala populations have also been a major victim of the flames, with more than 350 of the marsupials feared killed in a major habitat…”
