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The vast majority of Chinese students studying abroad never have contact with authorities from their country, but Chinese government operations on foreign campuses seeking to use and influence students do exist. The head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation warned last year – not naming China specifically – that Australia needs to be conscious of foreign influence in its universities, which affects the behaviour of lecturers and foreign students. The scope of these operations is difficult to determine, but professors at universities around the world have recounted instances of students reporting back to higher officials on the activities of their...

Karl Rove, a former senior advisor to President George W. Bush, has signed a deal with Simon & Schuster. Rove plans to write a book entitled The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters. Priscilla Painton, an executive editor, negotiated the deal with Robert Barnett, a partner at the Williams & Connolly LLP law firm.

All of NBC’s bleeding-heart coverage of tattered American race relations – including the racial struggles of Michelle Obama – might sound awfully tinny if they don’t keep black anchorman Lester Holt in the Nightly News anchor chair. In a new Brian Williams story at the Daily Beast, “a prominent black broadcast journalist who knows Holt” told them: “If Brian does not come back and Lester does not get the job, it’s going to get ugly. You can only imagine.” It would seem odd for them to exile Williams and then turn to Savannah Guthrie or someone else other than Holt,...

Obama gets three-book deal worth $1.9 million December 17, 2004 — U.S. Sen.-elect Barack Obama, who saw a book he wrote a decade ago jump onto best seller lists after his keynote address to the Democratic National Convention this summer, has landed a three-book deal worth $1.9 million. Crown Publishing Group and Random House Children's Books, both divisions of Random House Inc., announced Friday that Obama will write two books for adults as well as a children's book he will work on with his wife, Michelle, and their two young daughters. "Writing is something that Senator Obama obviously enjoys as...

Palins Get Ready to Spill By Kim Eisler Published Monday, April 06, 2009 Alaska’s Republican governor, Sarah Palin, has retained DC Democratic power player Robert Barnett to sell her presumed memoir of the 2008 campaign. The expected seven-figure book advance will make it easier for Palin to pay for travel to the “lower 48” for political events and then a presidential run. The book could put Palin into a 2012 race with President Obama, who used the same lawyer and the same strategy—a big advance and a book—in part to back his early campaign efforts. During the 2008 Democratic campaign,...

Sarah Palin shopping for a book deal? $11 million for the story of the hockey-mom from Alaska who ran for vice president? Michael Muskal of the Los Angeles Times writes that Robert Barnett of the Washington legal world, the book deal czar, is working with Palin. Barnett sealed the book deals for both Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton.

-snip- McCain made his first million the old-fashioned way: he married the daughter of a wealthy businessman. But Barack Obama, the son of an absent African father and a mother who relied on government-issued food stamps to feed her children, became a millionaire in a more modern manner – on the back of a book deal. It happened circuitously. In 1990, Obama was already enough of a celebrity – the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review – for the New York publishers Simon & Schuster to offer a “six-figure contract” for a proposed autobiography. The only problem...

NEW YORK (AP) The memoirs of former President Clinton, one of last year's biggest books, will come out in May in paperback, with some additional material and a format that divides the epic-length work into two. The announcement was made Wednesday by Clinton's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. "My Life," which has sold 2 million copies in its 957-page hardcover edition, actually will come out in two formats: trade paperback, which has the same dimensions as hardcover and will have a first printing of 250,000, and mass market paperback, a cheaper, pocket-sized edition. The mass market version of "My Life" will...

Top Bush advisor Karen Hughes, sometimes referred to as the most powerful woman in Washington, has hired D.C. power-lawyer Robert Barnett, the attorney who bailed out Hillary Clinton at a crucial point in the Whitewater scandal. While Barnett is more recently famous for nailing down record-breaking book deals for the former first couple, it was in the aftermath of the death of White House lawyer Vince Foster that the name of the Williams & Connolly attorney first appeared on the Clinton scandal radar screen. Mrs. Clinton was in Little Rock when Foster died, but when she got the news she...