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Another boat, believed to be carrying up to 180 asylum seekers, made a distress call to Australian authorities at about 4.30am (AEST) time this morning. The call said the boat was about 50 nautical miles south of Indonesia and heading to Christmas Island, and its engine had failed and that it was taking on water. ABC Online said the HMAS Wollongong was searching for the boat, but it had not been found.
A Rough Guide To The Dark Side Daniel Simpson Zero Books Release date: August 31 www.roughguidedarkside.com Most mainstream media journalists would kill to get one of their stories on the front page of The New York Times. But when that happened to the newspaper's Balkans correspondent in 2003, he was less than thrilled. Daniel Simpson had already resigned in disgust at the paper's support for starting wars, and was serving out his notice. He had reached what he calls "a mirrored ceiling" in his career.
Fly & Be Damned: What Now For Aviation & Climate Change? By Peter Mcmanners Zed Books, 2012 182 pages, $26.95 (pb) In a future green world, will there be a place for aviation? In Fly And Be Damned, Peter McManners thinks there will be, but air transport will look quite different.

Support Green Left TV to take on the media of the corporate rich. Watch it, share it, film it and help us raise $60,000 to get Green Left TV on it's feet and covering the struggles for change across Australia and globally.

After Julian Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London a rally was held in his home town Melbourne on July 1. Adam Bandt, the Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens and member of parliament spells out the Greens' perspective.

After Julian Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London a rally was held in his home town Melbourne on July 1. Civil Rights Lawyer Lizzie O'Shea gives her perspective.

Venezuela suspended oil shipments and withdrew its ambassador from Paraguay as part of a regional wave of condemnation against the ouster of leftist Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo on June 22. “We are absolutely not going to support this state coup, not directly, neither indirectly,” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on June 24.

The recent coup against Paraguay’s democratically elected president is not only a blow to democracy, but an attack against the working and poor population that supported President Fernando Lugo. The Paraguayan poor see Lugo as a bulwark against the wealthy elite who have dominated the country for decades. The United States mainstream media and politicians are not calling the events in Paraguay a coup, since the president is being “legally impeached” by the elite-dominated Paraguayan Congress.

Beyond Tribal Loyalties ― Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists Edited by Avigail Abarbanel Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012. Jews who come out on the side of Palestinians generally do not face terrible physical punishment, nor are they usually thrown in jail. But they often face ostracism, and this is what makes this community-creating book ― a collection of “Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists” ― so valuable.

Facts are stubborn things. It is now clear even to German Federal Bank board members that the brutal austerity applied to the eurozone “periphery” ― Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy ― is not just bleeding these economies white, but starting to hurt the Eurozone “core” and world economy. As a result, the investors, the nurturing of whose fragile confidence has been the whole justification for austerity, feel like investing even less. “This time Europe really is on the brink,” said economists Nouriel Roubini and Niall Ferguson in a June 12 Der Spiegel commentary.

Arriving in a village in southern Vietnam, I caught sight of two children who bore witness to the longest war of the 20th century. Their terrible deformities were familiar. All along the Mekong river, where the forests were petrified and silent, small human mutations lived as best they could. Today, at the Tu Du paediatrics hospital in Saigon, a former operating theatre is known as the "collection room" and, unofficially, as the "room of horrors". It has shelves of large bottles containing grotesque foetuses.

This video reports on the dramatic conclusion to the case of the Christmas Carol Criminals (pro-Palestine activists Alex Bainbridge and Miranda Wood who were arrested for singing Christmas carols). All charges were dismissed and the activists walked free.