Tagged: Australia

Alpine is a band from Melbourne, Australia, that will make their U.S. debut with A Is for Alpine, an album coming out later this spring.

The band, formerly known as Swiss, was chosen as the iTunes Australian alternative album of the year, and now the group is building buzz in the U.S., including this past week at the South By Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.

Alpine's Phoebe Baker and Lou James say that their first gig at SXSW was at a club called Bourbon Girl, where the vibe was electric.

You can see it on this Google Map — a little spit of land, sitting between Australia (on the left) and French-governed New Caledonia (on the right).

It's called "Sandy Island." In the Times Atlas of the World it's called "Sable Island." On both maps it's a conspicuous land mass, roughly 15 miles long from north to south, three miles across. Altogether, that's about 45 square miles — about one and a half times the size of Manhattan.

Last week we told you about "Prisoner X," the mysterious Israeli-Australian citizen who worked for Israel's spy agency Mossad. Australian media broke the story of how the man identified as Ben Zygier languished for months in an Israeli prison until he was found dead of an apparent suicide. Now we have new details on the case.