Polden, David

On 3 November, 10 Greenpeace anti-fracking activists were acquitted of highway obstruction by Blackpool magistrates court. The 10 had locked themselves together for eight hours, blockading the entrance to the Cuadrilla shale gas exploration site at Preston New Road near Blackpool in May.

In his judgement, the district judge said: ‘I have to consider location, duration, interference with the rights of others and overall reasonableness. If the crown cannot show that these defendants…

On 10 November, a trial at Stratford magistrates court in London descended into farce when the prosecution declined to show police bodycam video evidence because it ‘showed nothing’ and dropped the case. This was the first trial arising from a week of action in September aimed at disrupting the DSEI arms fair held in London’s Docklands (PN 2610–2611).

Chris Maunder was facing the most serious charge brought against any of the 102 DSEI arrestees: assaulting a police…

On 22 November, B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, issued a press release detailing the continuing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

The release…

As part of an international event, a four-day fast was held in central London between Hiroshima Day, 6 August, and Nagasaki Day, 9 August, to commemorate the 300,000 deaths caused by the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945.

At 8.15am on Hiroshima Day, three fasters set out banners on railings on the Thames side of the ministry of defence, where they camped throughout the fast. By 8 August, numbers had grown to seven, and they held a one-hour protest in front of Downing Street. They…

On 31 July, the high court in London overturned the convictions of five members of the Christian ‘Put Down the Sword’ affinity group who had blocked the entrance to Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) Burghfield in June 2016.

Nina Carter-Brown, Nick Cooper, Angela Ditchfield, Joanna Frew and Alison Parker had been found guilty of wilful obstruction of the highway by Reading magistrates in January. Their action (using lock-on tubes) was part of a month of action organised by Trident…

On 22 June, the high court in London ruled that the government had acted improperly by seeking to use pension law to pursue its own foreign and arms industry policy.

In September 2016, the department for communities and local government had published some innocuously titled ‘guidance’ on investment strategies for local government pension schemes.

The DCLG wrote: ‘using pension policies to pursue boycotts, divestment and sanctions against foreign nations and UK defence…

Every year on 4 July, US Independence Day, there is an ‘Independence from America’ protest at the Menwith Hill US spy base on the North Yorkshire Moors. The base is run by the US national security agency and is linked to circling satellites gathering political, military and economic information that is fed to the Pentagon in the USA.

This year began with a public reading of ‘The People’s Declaration for Independence FROM America’ and the handing over of a letter to the RAF…

In April, Manchester university students organised a one-week fast in solidarity with Palestinian hunger strikers. PHOTO: MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY 

As PN went to press, 850 Palestinian prisoners were entering their sixth week on hunger strike to try to get better treatment in Israeli jails.

Several dozen prisoners had been transferred to special prison wings with medical staff, according to prison officials.

The action started on 17 April, chosen as ‘Palestinian…

Three hibakusha, survivors

Three hibakusha – two survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and one of that of Nagasaki – set sail from Japan on board Peace Boat on 12 April for a 105-day global voyage.

Joined by two second generation hibakusha and two ‘youth communicators’, the delegation is visiting 22 countries, including the nuclear weapon states of France, Russia and the United States.

Ms Tsuchida Kazumi, Ms Tanaka Toshiko and Mr Mise Seeiichiro are giving personal…

On 7 March, a US district judge refused the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s attempt to stop oil flowing through a part of the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) near their reservation.

The Sioux thought they had won on 4 December when the US army corps of engineers stopped construction of DAPL for alternative routes to be considered. Then, on 24 January, US president Donald Trump signed an executive decree ordering the secretary of the army to expedite approval of the pipeline – without a…

A protest action in 1988 in which Phill Jones, Chipper Mills, and Tony Vallance from Faslane Peace Camp managed to get into the control room of one of the UK’s nuclear-armed submarines left British prime minister Margaret Thatcher ‘utterly horrified’, according to secret cabinet offices papers published by the National Archives on 29 December.

The papers describe how, at 1.15am on 10 October 1988, the three successfully broke into Faslane naval base north of Glasgow, climbed into…

In Australia, five Christian peace pilgrims had charges against them dismissed after entering one of the country’s most sensitive locations.

On 29 September, Jim Dowling, Margaret Pestorius, Andy Paine, Tim Webb and Franz Dowling walked onto the Pine Gap US spy base at Alice Springs, in Arrernte country, ‘to lament the death caused by the base and to resist the violence that is perpetrated there’.

The Pine Gap Five, aged 19 – 72, were charged with trespass under the…

The Women’s Boat to Gaza campaign (see PN 2598–2599) has announced that it will continue to sail until Palestine is free, despite the seizure of its first vessel. On 5 October, two Israeli warships and four or five smaller boats surrounded the Zaytouna-Oliva in international waters and ordered it to stop sailing towards the Palestinian coast.

When the women-only boat continued its siege-breaking journey, the Israeli defence forces (IDF) boarded and commandeered the…

In October, two women presented anti-nuclear arguments to Reading magistrates’ court, but were convicted for their actions during the June month of direct action at Atomic Weapons Establishment Burghfield.

On 14 October, Mary Millington pleaded not guilty to painting ‘No more deadly convoys’ on the road without permission, and ‘going equipped’ to cause criminal damage. When she was arrested on 28 June, police took two cans of spray paint and bolt croppers from her.

Mary…

On 9 August, there was a large waterborne protest, involving 33 activists in two yachts and 13 kayaks, at the only Trident submarine base for the US Pacific fleet, the Kitsap-Bangor naval base near Seattle, Washington state. The activists marked Nagasaki day by sailing and paddling the entire length of the Bangor waterfront where nuclear warheads and Trident missiles are loaded onto submarines, and where submarines are resupplied for ballistic missile patrols in the Pacific Ocean.
…