On one level Norman Finkelstein's new book, This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences in the Gaza Invasion, on Israel's 2008 invasion of Gaza does not reveal much new. It consists of information that has made its way to the public realm over the past year. Yet he brings together the disparate pieces of the event to sharp effect. There is a clear sense that the story has been insulted by the casualness of attention to it.

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now! launched her new book Breaking The Sound Barrier at an event co-hosted by community radio stations CJSF, Co-op Radio and CiTR in Vancouver, B.C. last night. Despite being detained by Canadian border services delaying her book launch by over an hour Amy Goodman delivered an impassioned lecture to a standing room only audience.

Goodman's 90-minute lecture touched on topics including the U.S. health care debate, the recent death of her mother, her arrest at the Republican National Convention, the importance of independent media, the upcoming summit in Copenhagen and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"A lot of Filipinos and others are silent in their jobs....They are scared that if they do something for change, they will be deported....They feel held at the blade between life and death."

When Norman Bethune left Montreal for Spain in 1936 to help the Republicans in their doomed effort to hold back Franco's fascists, he spoke no foreign languages and had no fixed role waiting for him. But he was among a group of determined individuals who believed "if fascism could be stopped in Spain, a larger war would not break out," and he wasted no time making himself useful. When Bethune left Madrid less than a year later, he had created and implemented a mobile blood transfusion unit, the first of its kind, that treated soldiers right at the front and drastically reduced fatalities. He was also on the verge of collapse, drinking heavily and making enemies on all sides.