PN staff
Six of the Kings Bay 7 have received their sentences – between one and three years in prison – for their disarmament action at a Trident base in Georgia, USA, in 2018. One will be sentenced in December.
The Ploughshares activists, five of them from Catholic Worker groups around the US, carried hammers and baby bottles of their own blood to three locations on the Kings Bay submarine base.
The seven Christians attempted to symbolically convert US weapons of mass destruction and…
On 2 November, four Palestine Action activists were arrested at an Israeli-owned drone factory in Shenstone, Staffordshire, after several locked-on to the factory gates. According to Palestine Action (PA), two legal observers were also arrested, after being pepper-sprayed.
Two other factories owned by Israeli drone manufacturer Elbit Systems were spraypainted the same day: the Elbit Ferranti factory in Oldham, Greater Manchester, and the Elite KL factory in Tamworth, Staffordshire.…
On 12 November, a giant 70 square metred (23-foot by 33-foot) Africans Rising banner was hung on scaffolding on the side of the houses of parliament in central London. The huge letter, launching the #ReRightHistory campaign of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity, made four demands. It called on the government of the UK to:
apologise for the human cost of slavery and colonialism begin a Truth and Reconciliation process in relation to the UK’s colonial crimes cancel African…
On 7 November, police arrested four people at the socially-distanced weekly vigil for Julian Assange in Piccadilly Circus, using new COVID-related powers granted on 3 November.
Earlier, on 3 October, police exceeded the powers they possessed at that time by dispersing the vigil. On that occasion, there were 18 people expressing solidarity with the imprisoned WikiLeaks founder.
Twice that many police were on hand, and they arrested four demonstrators, presumably to encourage the…
Shouldn’t there be someone keeping a close eye on the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) which designs, manufactures and maintains Britain’s nuclear warheads?
Especially now the British government is building ‘Dreadnought’ nuclear missile submarines to replace the Trident submarines which carry Britain’s only nuclear weapons?
Well there is someone keeping a very close eye on AWE and on Britain’s military nuclear programme as a whole.
It’s a…
On 23 August, an online international workshop on the role of diplomacy in crisis management was held by the Africa Centre for Training, Consulting and Communication in collaboration with Cardiff’s Atlantis Academy.
From Wales, Stephen Thomas of Hub Cymru Africa spoke about Wales as a small nation with an international impact on peace processes and human rights projects in many African countries.
Pamela Christine Evans spoke about the ‘Peace Mala’ project in Swansea as a model…
Despite COVID-19 restrictions, there were several in-person Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorations in the UK to mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings in Japan.
In Bristol, CND, Trident Ploughshares, and XR Peace organised an ambitious four-day Peace Gathering, which began and ended with die-ins, in Castle Park in central Bristol (above).
As well as the ‘longest banner drop in Bristol’ (91m along Finzel’s Reach Bridge over the harbour), there was a leafleting-and-…
In the world’s first successful challenge against the use of automatic facial recognition technology (AFR) by police, the court of appeal ruled on 11 August that the South Wales police (SWP) force’s use of AFR had been unlawful. This overturned a high court ruling the other way.
The appeal was brought by Liberty, on behalf of anti-arms trade activist Ed Bridges. The court upheld three of the five grounds Liberty raised.
It found that the legal framework for the use of AFR was…
For those of us outside the US, it’s hard to know what we can do to be useful to folk in the US who’re being attacked by state forces, who’re trying to bring down an appalling president, and who’re trying to build a more just society.
We have decided to try to raise £1,948 to send to the Poor People’s Campaign, an enormously impressive multi-racial, multi-issue coalition whose civil disobedience led to 2,500 arrests in mid-2018. (…
On 21 July, a new political party calling itself ‘Beyond Politics’ threw buckets of pink paint over the front doors of Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Christian Aid.
The driving force behind the new group – which launched itself at the end of June with a shoplifting stunt at a branch of Sainsbury’s in Camden – appears to be Extinction Rebellion (XR) co-founder Roger Hallam.
On 25 July, XR UK issued a statement clarifying that ‘Roger Hallam no longer…
The British government is going to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia again, after deciding there is ‘not a clear risk’ of those weapons being used to attack civilians in Yemen. Saudi-led forces have been waging war in Yemen since March 2015.
The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) responded: ‘This is a disgraceful and morally bankrupt decision. The Saudi-led bombardment of Yemen has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and the government itself admits that UK-made arms have played…
Since the beginning of lockdown, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has held a series of webinars (including ‘Ventilators not exterminators: why now is the time for defence diversification’); run an online lobbying campaign directed at MPs (‘Wash our hands of Trident to combat COVID19’); and run an online competition to produce eye-catching posters that people can print off and display in their windows.
This year’s…
British officials might stand trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity because of the British government’s refusal to return the illegally-occupied Chagos Islands to Mauritius.
That was the threat made on 27 December by the prime minister of Mauritius, Pravind Jugnauth, after an advisory opinion by the world court last February and the expiry of a six-month deadline set by the UN general assembly.
The Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean include…
The end of the world is closer than it’s ever been, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. On 23 January, the Bulletin moved the hands of its Doomsday Clock 20 seconds forward.
The clock, which symbolises how close humanity is to destruction, is now only 100 seconds to midnight.
Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin, said: ‘We now face a true emergency – an absolutely unacceptable state of world affairs that has eliminated any margin for…
