PN staff
Protests are being prepared for a visit to the UK by Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman between 7 – 9 March. Human rights campaigners are pressing for him to be arrested for war crimes.
‘The crown prince is a figurehead for a regime with one of the worst human rights records in the world. He has overseen the…
The two-week COP23 climate talks in Bonn, Germany, in November were met with a 25,000-strong march; a 4,500-strong mine invasion (above right); the occupation of a nearby coal-fired power station; a banner-hang on a coal ship in Bonn itself;…
On 6 October, the Norwegian Nobel committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2017 to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Executive director Beatrice Fihn laughed in disbelief when the committee rang to inform her.
ICAN was awarded the prize for drawing attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons, and for its work on a nuclear…
New York, 7 July 2017: Negotiations of a new international treaty that bans nuclear weapons concluded at the United Nations today as the treaty was formally adopted by states. The United Kingdom, alongside other nuclear-armed states, has boycotted the negotiations despite government claims to support multilateral disarmament and a world without nuclear weapons.
'States that are serious about eliminating nuclear weapons have joined the United Nations treaty negotiations to ban nuclear…
The Movement for the Abolition of War (MAW), organiser of the series of Peace History Conferences, has a strong and creative relationship with the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London. This works because, on MAW’s side, there is an attitude not of dogmatic pacifism but of reasoned opposition to the…
On 8 May, a wedding was broken up on the steps of the London headquarters of the Church of England.
Christ’s bride (representing the church) was about to be given in marriage to the fossil fuel industry, when Jesus objected and persuaded the bride to break her engagement with fossil fuels and to seek forgiveness.
Christian Climate Action’s sketch was one of dozens of actions around the UK during the Global Divestment Mobilisation (5 – 13 May).
Thousands of people…
PHOTO: Emma Sangster
The Peace News/Housmans Bookshop ‘Chelsea Manning Freedom Party’ had people crowding into the bookshop on 17 May to eat cake and hear trans women Kirsten and Mika; Ben Griffin of Veterans for Peace; and others.
Lots of high-profile direct action cases have court dates coming up.
DSEI appeal
On 13 June, the high court in London will review the acquittal of eight anti-arms fair activists – Isa Al-Aali (Bahrain), Bram Vranken (Belgium), Luis Tinoco Torrejon (Peru), and Lisa Butler, Angela Ditchfield, Thomas Franklin, Susannah Mengesha (UK) – by Stratford magistrates court in April 2016.
The high court’s decision is likely to affect peace activists’ ability to use the legal defence…
Holding a meeting by online video saves travel time, money and carbon emissions, but it does mean most people have to have access to the equipment and to the internet. (You can add someone who just has a phone, but it costs money – see below).
We’re going to talk about using Skype for internet video meetings though there are other options.
Skype has been owned by Microsoft since 2011, and Microsoft has made Skype video, audio and text messages available for capture by US…
The Bread and Roses Award for radical non-fiction will be announced at the London Radical Bookfair on 24 June. This is the shortlist.
The Hammer Blow
The Hammer Blow: How 10 Women Disarmed a War Plane by Andrea Needham (310pp; £10; Peace News): ‘The heroic actions of this small, but determined, group of women is told brilliantly in Andrea Needham’s fascinating account. They spent six months in jail for acting upon their consciences – but were eventually, and rightly,…
When the organising collective gathered to think about this year’s Peace News Summer Camp, we were still reeling from the EU referendum result and the election of Donald Trump.
We tried to think about what we needed to help us keep going as activists, and what would help our movements to keep going in the middle of this bewildering turmoil and with the growing scale of the threats that we face.
That’s why we chose this theme together: ‘Surviving Politics – self…
'Vote for nobody’. There is a strong anarchist strain in the nonviolent direct action corner of the peace movement. Part of that anarchist strand abstains from voting, some folk even campaign against voting in elections – to break down illusions about parliamentary democracy. This graffiti used to be on a wall in Guelph, Ontario in Canada – it was painted over several years ago.
On 18 April, the ruling Conservative Party called a snap general election in Britain for 8 June. This is a survey…
Today, Peace News is publishing the first full-face photographs of 'Andy Davey', the identity taken by undercover police officer Andy Coles in 1991 when he infiltrated the nonviolent direct action group ARROW.
Coles was publicly exposed as a police infiltrator on 12 May, after investigation by the Undercover Research Group. On the same day, details emerged of an abusive sexual relationship…
Chelsea Manning is a whistleblower who was working for the US military as a data analyst during the US-led coalition war in Afghanistan. She was sentences to serving 35 years in military prison for leaking classified US government documents to the Wikileaks website, and revealing to the public that the US army, the CIA and Iraqi and Afghan forces committed human rights violations. The crimes she exposed have never been investigated.
In one of his final acts before leaving office, US…
