- Watch tonight's annual Lowy Lecture, delivered by Rupert Murdoch, live on ABC News 24.
- The Washington Post reveals that the NSA has infiltrated Google and Yahoo data centres.
- Suppose they gave a peace conference and nobody came? On Syria's leaderless opposition movement.
- China economics expert Michael Pettis revisits some of the dark predictions he made in 2011.
- A primer on the November plenum of the Chinese Communist Party.
- New Centre for Independent Studies report on China's evolving model of 'accountable authoritarianism', and why it will last.
- Brookings has a new Africa blog. (H/t MR.)
- Today is AusAID's last day as a separate entity before merging with DFAT. Here's a deeply felt personal reflection from Robyn Davies (thanks Annmaree):
Now the borders around AusAID are being comprehensively breached and dismantled, probably beyond any possibility of easy reconstruction. While this is in the end just a ‘machinery of government’ change, it is inevitably experienced as an affront, a personal loss, to the people who have invested their working lives, or their hopes for a working life, in the organisation. The affront might have been lessened if there were a perception that this unheralded merger were not in reality a hostile takeover...