PN staff
In mid-March, two US researchers put forward a proposal for a new nuclear disarmament treaty, ‘All START’, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. This would include all five nuclear weapon states recognised in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: Britain, China and France as well as Russia and the US.
Another new move would be to make the treaty ‘of unlimited duration’ instead of time-limited.
Russia announced in February that it would be suspending its participation in New…
On 1 January, the direct action climate group Extinction Rebellion (XR) UK announced that it was making a ‘controversial’ New Year’s resolution to ‘temporarily shift away from public disruption as a primary tactic’. The move seems to have been partly motivated by a fear of the new public order legislation the government has brought in to suppress disruptive direct action.
The XR statement, headed ‘We Quit’, ended by promoting ‘The Big One’, a massive multi-day action that XR plans to…
Afghanistan was a major topic of media debate in January, but not because of the humanitarian catastrophe there, or the way that the West has contributed to the economic crisis, including by ‘freezing’ (stealing) Afghanistan’s foreign reserves.
Right-wing newspapers were upset that the younger son of the new king of the UK had ‘boasted’ in his new book, Spare, of killing 25 suspected Afghan insurgents during his tour of duty in Afghanistan as an Apache helicopter pilot.
…One of last year’s most talked-about British direct actions ended with Hannah Hunt (23) and Eben Lazarus (22) walking free from court, with £850 fines. The two Just Stop oil supporters had glued a nightmare version of Constable’s The Hay Wain over the painting itself in the National Gallery on 4 July – and glued their own hands to the frame of the painting (PN 2661).
They were found ‘guilty’ of aggravated trespass and criminal damage at Westminster magistrates court…
Drone Wars UK warned in January that two recent trials of AI-controlled military drones showed the urgent need for international controls over the development and use of ‘killer robots’.
In January, the British ministry of defence revealed that it had carried out trials on Salisbury Plain in December of a ‘swarm’ of Ghost drones controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) which was updated during the drone’s flight.
In the US, drone manufacturer General Atomics also carried out…
‘The unanimous view of the UN, the Red Cross, Red Crescent, the nongovernmental organisations, our own 1,500 aid workers, who are now being paralysed, is that the crisis is just catastrophic. It’s a population in freefall, really. Again, it’s minus-15 Celsius, but people are out in the open. People have now been hungry for months.
‘Famine is coming and will engulf six million, is the estimation. Water and sanitation is lacking for people. Epidemic disease is threatening. It couldn’t…
People around the world continue to campaign against the extradition of Julian Assange to the US , where he faces a 175-year sentence for publishing truthful information in the public interest – US government documents revealing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
On 20 January, campaigners in the US held ‘The Belmarsh Tribunal’, an online event bringing together a range of expert witnesses – from constitutional lawyers to acclaimed journalists and human rights defenders – to…
On 14 January, the Daily Telegraph published its latest investigation into sexual assault in the British army.
Danielle Sheridan, the paper’s defence editor, reported: ‘Hundreds of female members of the Armed Forces who accused their colleagues of rape were “misdiagnosed” with having a personality disorder.’
The women were medically discharged after seeking help for sexual assault and being ‘written off’ with emotionally unstable personality disorder.
Sheridan…
Ukrainian conscientious objector Vitaliy Alexeienko had his appeal rejected on 16 January and is believed to have been imprisoned shortly afterwards by order of an appeal court in Ivano-Frankivsk in Western Ukraine. Ukraine has suspended the right of conscientious objection.
Vitaliy, 46, had told the authorities last June that he refused to be conscripted into the Ukrainian army because of his pacifist religious beliefs.
He said that he was willing to take up alternative…
The mainstream media continues to suppress unwelcome but crucial facts about Ukraine’s recent peace positions, and to distort Russia’s current position.
It goes without saying that the Russian invasion a year ago was a criminal act and that Russia has committed and continues to commit a host of war crimes. However, it does not help us to find a way out of this disaster if we distort the facts.
Lawrence Freedman is perhaps the most respected foreign policy academic in Britain.…
After eight years of war, the people of Yemen are enduring one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Oxfam says that ‘24 million people – 80 percent of Yemen’s population – need emergency aid, the greatest number in any country in the world.’
A quarter of the population is malnourished.
There were some signs of hope in January; a new truce may be agreed soon between the Saudi-led coalition and their Houthi opponents.
However, according to one study, there have been…
Britain is sending uranium weapons to be used in Ukraine. That was revealed in a parliamentary written answer from junior defence minister baroness Annabel Goldie on 20 March, first reported by Declassified UK the next day.
The advanced Challenger 2 tanks that Britain is exporting to Ukraine will be sent with
CHARM 3 armour-piercing depleted uranium (DU) rounds, Goldie confirmed.
CND general secretary Kate Hudson responded: ‘Like in Iraq, the addition of depleted…
Despite pleading from defence secretary Ben Wallace, there was no increase in British military spending in the government’s November budget (officially an ‘autumn statement’).
Wallace, a popular Conservative MP, had previously warned that he would resign if the government did not commit itself to increasing military spending to three percent of GDP. (British spending has been at the NATO target of two percent of GDP.)
Chancellor of the exchequer Jeremy Hunt instead said on 17…
‘The ultimate test of this COP is that it has responded to the voices of the climate vulnerable by establishing a fund for loss and damage.’ That was Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s minister for climate change, speaking at the closing session of COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on 20 November, on behalf of most of the Global South – she was representing the G77/China* group.
Here in the UK, Friends of the Earth welcomed the fund as ‘a first step towards wealthy nations providing loss and…
28 peace activists have volunteered to act as an unarmed civilian protection team at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in Ukraine.
John Reuwer, founder of the Zaporizhzhya Protection Proposal project, writes: ‘Among the most immediate of the many threats faced by Ukrainians is the release of a nuclear dirty bomb by an intentional or accidental mishap at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant.’
The group plans to send a team of trained unarmed civilians to support inspectors…
