A new Beatles track dropped this morning Australia time. Quite a feat for a band that broke up 49 years ago, has two deceased members, and the two remaining members are both Octogenarians.
 
With a little help from filmmaker Peter Jackson and his Machine Audio Learning software, they were able to isolate out the John Lennon vocals from a previously unreleased demo record he made called For Paul. They then layered in guitar recordings from George Harrison from the 90s, and add a fresh baseline, drumming and vocals from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.  

This week in the coverage of the conflict between Israel and Palestine there’s been a shift. After the initial bloody attacks from Hamas fighters against civilian Israelis, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was lit up blue and white in support of Israel. But as the Palestinian civilian death toll has ticked up through a breath-taking bombing response; as Gaza has been besieged even more than usual generating millions of displaced people within the city; and the boots-on-the-ground counter-offensive hasn’t begun yet, some of our political leaders are beginning to ask, “Should we be completely behind Israel on this?”

Have you seen the new coin design with the King on the back? It’ll start being circulated very soon and will gradually make their way into our spare change in the next year or so. I understand that monarchs take approving this image of themselves very seriously – this portrait image is selected by the king himself at the Royal Mint in the UK and then that image is on-distributed to Commonwealth countries for use.

 A little over a week ago the Bureau of Meteorology announced that we’ve moved back in to an El Niño weather pattern. The tropical waters North-East of Australia are cooler than normal, meaning there’s less evaporation and so less clouds across Eastern Australia.