PN staff
The maximum number of nuclear bombs held by Britain is to rise from 180 to 260 warheads, the British government announced on 16 March.
According to analysis by Nukewatch, Britain’s nuclear arsenal had already risen to around 250 warheads by the end of last year (see 'Warhead movements' below).
The chair of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear…
As PN went to press, Israeli airstrikes and artillery fire on Gaza had claimed nearly 200 lives, and Palestinians were fearing another ground assault.
Shortly afterwards, on 21 May, after 11 days of violence, the Israeli government and Palestinian militants in Gaza accepted a ceasefire.
Hamas, the Palestinian armed movement which rules Gaza, had first …
Image
CND vice-president Bruce Kent recently had this photo taken to show off his unbroken run of Housmans Peace Diaries from 1980 to 2020. Do you have a longer sequence? Do you own more than Bruce’s record-breaking collection of 41 one-year-after-the-other Housmans Peace Diaries? If so, claim your prize by sending a photo to: editorial@peacenews.info
The UN’s head of humanitarian affairs has described the ‘huge cut’ in UK aid to Yemen as a ‘quite shocking’ attempt to ‘balance the books on the backs of starving people’.
Mark Lowcock was reacting to the UK’s pledge of only £87m of aid compared to the pledge of £160m it made a year earlier – and the £214m it actually delivered in 2020 – 2021.
For several years now, the UN and humanitarian agencies have described Yemen as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
Mark…
Police killed 15 – 20 percent fewer people between 2014 and 2019 in those parts of the US where there had been Black Lives Matter protests.
Where there were larger and more frequent BLM protests, there was a steeper decline in police killings.
These are the findings of a new study by US economist Travis Campbell posted in February (but not yet peer-reviewed): ‘Black Lives Matter’s Effect on Police Lethal Use-of-Force’.
Campbell wrote: ‘The payoff for protesting is…
British anti-fracking campaigners have been celebrating several wins recently.
On 2 March, West Sussex county council rejected new plans to test drill for oil in Balcombe, site of an early anti-fracking struggle in 2013.
Despite council officers recommending approval of the revised plan from Angus Energy, councillors unanimously refused the application.
On another front, at the beginning of February, anti-fracking campaigners were celebrating in Surrey and Sussex when…
A Quick guide to NI
by PN staff
As many readers will know, the Northern Ireland mini-state was created when the British government partitioned Ireland 100 years ago, on 3 May 1921.
Since then, there have been people in NI who want to reunite the six NI counties with the rest of Ireland – they’re known as ‘nationalists’ and ‘republicans’. Against them have been those who want to maintain British rule over NI – known as ‘unionists’ and ‘loyalists’.…
The contract for processing UK census forms has been put in the hands of Leidos, one of the world’s biggest military companies. We invite you to take action through the census form itself, to suggest to others that they do the same – and, crucially, (a) tell your local paper about what you’re doing and (b) tell us what you’re doing!
In 2011, the contract for processing the census in the UK was awarded to the US arms company Lockheed Martin, leading to quite a lot of protest, including…
The incoming Joe Biden administration stepped in to renew New START for another five years on 3 February, two days before the treaty was due to expire.
New START places limits on the US and Russia in terms of warheads, missiles and launchers that can be used for a nuclear attack on each other’s homelands (‘strategic’ weapons).
Each military can only have 700 ‘deployed’ (operational and armed) methods of attack at any one time.
They can split up that 700 number between…
On 22 January, a Ukrainian journalist and conscientious objector was attacked in western Ukraine by a far-right mob shouting ‘Death to the enemies! Ukraine above all!’
Ruslan Kotsaba, a member of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, was sprayed with a fire extinguisher as he made his way into Kolomyia city district court in Ivano-Frankivsk region. He did not suffer any serious injuries.
Ruslan was on trial (again) for a video he posted in 2015 in which he called for people to…
A majority of people in Britain think that the UK should sign up to the UN’s nuclear ban treaty, which entered into force on 22 January.
That was the finding of a Survation poll commissioned by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), Britain’s largest peace organisation by membership.
Survation found that 59 percent of the British public thought the UK should sign up to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), and 77 percent supported a total global nuclear…
The need for a #PeoplesVaccine is the front page story in the latest issue of Peace News: …
This year, the contract for processing census forms has been put in the hands of Leidos, one of the world’s biggest military companies.
So far, there hasn’t been much debate about this. We’d like to change that. We invite you to take action through the census form itself, to suggest to your friends they do the same – and, crucially, (a) tell your local paper about what you’re doing and (b) tell us what you’re doing!
In 2011, the contract for processing the census in the UK was…
Peace News has recently launched a new survey of UK activists and campaigners, with the aim of encouraging them to share their stories of success in winning concrete gains for people targeted by racism – and in making their groups, events, spaces and projects more racially-inclusive.
By encouraging UK campaigners to share their stories of constructive anti-racist action we aim to create a peer-to-peer handbook, based on people’s lived experiences that celebrates our…
The PN staff have each chosen their favourite books and films they read and saw this year. Here’s what we came up with!
The best book I’ve read this year? Difficult one. How do you compare different genres? The most enjoyable was Becky Chambers’s The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (Hodder and Stoughton, 2015, £8.99) and A Closed and Common Orbit (Hodder and Stoughton, 2016, £8.99).
This is two-thirds of her ‘Wayfarer’ trilogy.
It’s feminist…
