Johns, Emily

The third and biggest British Camp for Climate Action fed, watered and educated perhaps 3,000 people from 3-11 August, sparked actions around the country, triggered 100 arrests and two prison sentences and culminated in a massive day of action against the proposed new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Essex.

Climate Camp highlighted the importance of the Kingsnorth decision as a key indicator of whether or not Britain is serious about avoiding catastrophic climate change (see…

There were many acts of remembrance around the country when the hundredth British soldier was killed in Afghanistan, names of the dead were read out. The occasion highlighted the enormous importance of Iraq Body Count’s work in collecting the names of non combatants killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. There are in contrast so few names of Afghans killed, there is no one doing an Afghan body count. Uncounted Afghan’s have lost their lives, and without their names who knows if they ever…

I heard David Ferrard sing in April at the launch of the Festival of Nonviolence and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

In the very simplest manner of music appreciation, hearing a voice that can touch, with great finesse and sweetness, one’s body is a strange wonder.

This collection has the current wars weaving their way through a series of love songs.

There is the subtle story of a Chechen refugee drawn to England by the music coming from his pocket radio, and…

Lucy Edkins’ paintings are naked, painful suffering images of our fellow men.

They are hanging high up on the walls of Housmans Bookshop – in traditional art jargon they have been “skied” by the primacy of books. But this very inaccessibility that me think of church paintings and then of mediaeval images of “The Passion”.

Lucy Edkins has created a series of paintings of Guantanamo, of men crouching and twisting from their torturers; flinching from the soldiers with their guns…

There is something surreal about the holding of a Peace History conference attended by some of the country’s longest-serving peace activists right in the heart of the Imperial War Museum.

The outgoing director of the museum, Sir Robert Crawford CBE, welcomed us all to the two-day event, thanking Bruce Kent of the Movement for the Abolition of War, a conference organiser, for his cooperation over the years.
We then heard an array of speakers on a wide variety of topics, almost…

Imagine travelling the world in your dreams, navigating your way through its war zones with a set of dream maps – maps with some of the traditions of Western cartography, indications of lines of longitude and latitude, perhaps the outlines of countries – as well as beautiful colours rising off the land.

Bomb after Bomb is an atlas of places the United States has bombed, stretching from 19th century Nicaragua to 21st century Iraq, using hypnotically beautiful paintings by US artist…

Elsewhere in this issue we report the significant progress made by government propaganda in relation to the war in Afghanistan. Public support for the war is growing, despite - or because of? - the intensity of the conflict.

More people still oppose the war than support it, but the trend is worrying if the “Harry effect” is a lasting one.
Over the past two years there has been a conscious, systematic and well-resourced attempt to re-legitimise Britain's armed forces (and…

The theme of this issue - and of Peace News in general - is “the power of nonviolence”.

As this issue goes to press, Peter Gelderloos, the author of How Nonviolence Protects The State (partially reviewed in PN2487-8), begins a UK speaking tour devoted to denigrating the power of nonviolence (tour details on p16).

Peace News welcomes debate, and therefore we welcome Peter Gelderloos to the UK, despite our profound disagreements with him on strategy and principle.…

You may or may not have noticed that since 10 June - for over five months - the people of Belgium have struggled on without a government.

Well, we say “struggled on”. The political deadlock in the country has been a factor in declining “consumer confidence” apparently (does this mean people are spending less on things they don't need, and borrowing less money that they can't pay back?), but otherwise the people of Belgium have managed to keep breathing, eating, feeding themselves…

After four years of mounting tension, Iran has finally agreed to answer by December all questions about its nuclear programme posed by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The United States, however, seems to want to undermine the Iran-IAEA agreement reached on 21 August, arguing that it does not halt Iran's uranium enrichment capability immediately.

    According to IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei, the purpose of the new “work…

The Camp for Climate Action at Heathrow has been hailed, rightly, as one of the most important protests of our time.

Climate change is not simply one of the greatest threats facing future generations of humanity, it is one of the greatest threats facing the people of the Global South, whose homes and livelihoods are being destroyed today - as a consequence of the power and greed of Western corporations and states, and the apathy and irresponsibility of Western consumers.

…

On 14 August, Marcus Armstrong, a 46-year-old anti-war protester who entered the cockpit of a US Air Force plane at Prestwick Airport, Scotland, a year ago was imprisoned for 28 days for “entering a restricted zone” and “trespassing” in a military aircraft.

Marcus entered Prestwick with seven other Trident Ploughshares “weapons inspectors” to investigate claims that the airport was being used to refuel US aircraft supplying arms for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon…

On 23 August, many anarchists will mark the 80th anniversary of the execution by electric chair of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two working class (male) Italian anarchist immigrants to the United States, whose fate seized the world's attention.

Peace News is marking the anniversary by addressing two of the issues raised by the Sacco and Vanetti case - the situation of immigrants in rich Western societies, and the question of violence in social change. Sacco…

The British legal system has begun finally to re-consider the conviction of the two Libyans jailed for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which came down over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, causing the deaths of 270 civilians in all.

The suspicion at the time of the bombing was that the Lockerbie bombing might have been retaliation for the destruction of an Iranian civilian airliner, a year earlier, on 3 July 1987, by US sea-to-air missiles, causing the deaths of 290 civilians…

The greatest danger to the peo ples of the Middle East, including the people of Israel, comes from Israel's determination to retain control of the land it conquered 40 years ago, and its willingness to use nuclear weapons to maintain its dominance of these territories.

Israel is committed to a semi-open nuclear policy referred to as the “Samson option”, a threat to bring down the entire Middle East, and perhaps even the world, to maintain its controlling position, and to prop up…