THE PLACES FLED X

Shot of a jigsaw

This is the last goodbye, the song by Jim Buckley, from the album Grace, kept playing through his head; an eternal loop. It was Sexy Night at the Lakeside Hotel, and girls in tight bikinis wandered through the clusters of working class men, and he would remain an outcast. Always passing through. If there was anything to be said, he wasn't saying it, and they weren't asking. "You're not gay?" someone asked; and the red rain kept falling down. Wind whipped across the Illawara, and a great fragment of life, of time, drifted away as the gums churned with each new gust.
"They're very beautiful trees, gums," he commented to a pleasant enough old soak in the corner.
"I like the apple gums," he said.
"They're not gums, they're angophoras," he said. "You mean the ones that curl around a lot?"
Yes.
"They're coastal angophoras. There's desert ones as well, big. Beautiful trees."
They contemplated this for a moment, as the wind whipped up the trees behind them.
"You a little depressed?" the man asked.
"A little," he said. "Nothing. I didn't expect to be here. I'm doing stuff I've never done before."
Men gathered for a smoke on the verandah several of them man mountains.
They all knew each other.
He didn't know anyone.
The day crawled into evening and he took a thousand steps home, counting the rhythm inside his brain, everything at odds.
Played The Last Goodbye and slept.
There was no way out; he got up and went again.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-24288868

International police body Interpol has issued its highest level wanted persons notice on behalf of Kenyan authorities for Briton Samantha Lewthwaite, known as the 'white widow'.

Ms Lewthwaite is the widow of one of the four suicide bombers who attacked London on 7 July 2005 and has been linked with the Somali militant Islamist group al-Shabab - the organisation behind the attack on Nairobi's Westgate shopping mall.

Security correspondent Frank Gardner explains why Samantha Lewthwaite's Kenyan charges relate not to this month's Westgate attack but to her "alleged possession of explosives in December 2011 and an alleged plot at that time to bomb a number of tourist resorts".

- See more at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/election-2013/joel-fitzgibbon-says-kevin-rudd-wrotepolicies-on-the-run-during-the-election-campaign/story-fn9qr68y-1226719437784#sthash.EEq9rs1D.dpuf

FEDERAL Labor frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon admits some of Kevin Rudd's election policies were written "on the run".

But the key Rudd supporter insists Labor performed better under Mr Rudd than was expected before he seized back the leadership from Julia Gillard in June.

Breaking her silence on Labor's election loss, Ms Gillard has ridiculed some of Mr Rudd's 2013 policies, including proposals for a different corporate tax rate for the Northern Territory and a plan to move naval assets from Sydney's Garden Island to Brisbane.

Writing for the Guardian Australia, Ms Gillard said both ideas should be ditched.

“There were some policies on the run, there's no doubt about that,” Mr Fitzgibbon told ABC's Insiders program today.

“I think Kevin was playing a bit of catch-up football, I'd expect that, we were coming from behind. Sometimes you throw a wild pass and it pays off, on other occasions it gets intercepted and it doesn't work, but I don't, I wouldn't criticise him for trying.

“I defended the Garden Island proposal on the basis that it was a long-term thought-out plan that came out of the strategic posture review and he was talking about forming a committee to look at a plan over 30 years.

“The Northern Territory policy was fine on principle. I think it fell over because of lack of detail. I think if you're going to put out big policies like that during a campaign you need to be ready to put some meat on it.”