Survival International

One year after photos of previously uncontacted Amazon Indians made headlines around the world, a new report from Survivial International reveals the five uncontacted tribes most at risk of extinction. The tribes face invasion of their lands – by loggers, ranchers, colonists and oil companies – and all are at grave risk of being decimated by diseases to which they have no immunity.

The Survival International report, is available as a pdf download or there is an html version supported with images and video clips.

it - International Times archive

Now online, courtesy of the Underground Press Archive Group, the paper that gave a voice to the counter-culture is available free online, featuring original writing from William Burroughs, John Peel and even an early poem from Heathcote Williams:
www.internationaltimes.it

[via johnnyvoid]

Chris Gray - Leaving the 20th Century

Co-editor of the magazine Heatwave and active member of the English situationist King Mob and editor the influential introduction to situationist ideas, Leaving the Twentieth Century, has died.
A lengthy obituary by his comrade and lifelong friend Charlie Radcliffe appears on: http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com

"Though Chris’s bourgeois background seemed superficially akin to mine our experiences were different. While I had protested with the Committee of 100 in England, he had travelled extensively. Hanging out in Tangiers and Paris’ Beat Hotel, Chris had met and knew several of the leading lights of the cultural avant-garde now burgeoning into an élite within the then new ‘counter-culture’. While my past included a veritable mishmash of ill-digested influences – largely ‘Beat’, anarchist and then surrealist – he was a cultural dissident, led into the ‘new politics’ by an initial interest in the angry young men. By now, however, he had read Antonin Artaud, had pronounced ideas on the Surrealists and Dada-ists as well as on art and anti-art. He was scathing about all avant-garde art – except Dada and to a more limited extent Surrealism. He was equally utterly contemptuous of hippie culture – “the latest slave ideology imported from America” he called it..."

England's Greatest Radical? Gerard Winstanley, the Digger, 1609-1676

A lecture to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the birth of the Digger, Gerard Winstanley, given at Newcastle University by John Gurney last month, is now available online. John Gurney is the author of Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution.
(note that the lecture doesn't last as long as the time given on the website)
To listen to the lecture click here.

Blackwells - Podcasts

Booksellers, Blackwells, are making some great podcasts available every couple of weeks. The most recent includes Kazuo Ishiguro, who talks about his first volume of short stories, Nocturnes - "a bittersweet collection" that owes its inspiration to his fascination with music. Nick Davies, whose book Flat Earth News last week won the first Bristol Festival of Ideas Book Prize sponsored by Blackwell, explains why he thinks journalism has been replaced by "churnalism". The third author is Mark Bostridge, whose biography of Florence Nightingale reveals that she was neither saint nor villain, but something much more interesting than the myth.

Other authors include Alain de Botton, Peter Carey and Ben Goldacre. All the podcasts to date have been archived.

Blackwells podcasts can be found here.