On 7 October, Chris Coverdale of Rye, East Sussex, was imprisoned for 42 days by Hastings magistrate court, for refusing to pay over £1,800 in council tax to Rother district council.
According to the Hastings & St Leonards Observer, Chris said he believed it would be a criminal offence under the…
Turning the Tide supports people at the grassroots to work effectively for social change. The trainers deliver workshops and events and are supported by the community of trainers and Turning the Tide staff.
The opportunity is open to anyone sympathetic to Quakers with facilitation skills and experience of working at the grassroots for social change. If you are interested, or know someone who might be, please go to the…
hoo:ha bills itself as 'comic performance art that cleverly pits funniness against sexiness in a knock-down, drag-out fight for control of the female body'. It was definitely funny, and it was often funny about sexiness, but there wasn't much of a battle between funniness and sexiness, and if control of the female body was explored, that was never explicit beyond the promotional material.
In terms of…
This was one of the most powerful pieces of theatre I've seen in a long time. The audience was promised gun-twirlin', play-actin', and Nancy-Sinatra-dancin'. We got all those things, and we didn't get any strong swear words, explicit sexual references, nudity, or actual bloodshed. Technically, it was a show you could have taken your children to, but it was also much more sexual, and certainly more violent and disturbing, than the show I went on to watch later that evening, which actually…
Trident Ploughshares has today, 1 October 2015, launched a project to encourage groups around England and Wales to go to their local magistrates court to try and initiate a citizen's prosecution against the secretary of state for defence for conspiring to commit a war crime.
If this is done in many places, lots of local people will hear the arguments for and against Trident and the legal system will have to deal with the multiple attempts to get the courts to examine the legality of…
This was one of those plays which makes you feel you must have missed something when you finish watching it.
I'm reasonably confident I didn't miss something though, as the friend I watched it with had exactly the same response. It was as if the team behind 'Superfunadventuretimes' had come up with a concept (which was, very vaguely: the fantasy genre à la Brecht), been carried away with the…
A reader in Germany has sent us news of PN appearing as an artefact in an art exhibition!
A display case in the 'Picasso and contemporary art' exhibition in the gigantic Deichtorhallen art centre in Hamburg, Germany, contains a recent edition of Peace News!
Corrymeela Community, in County Antrim in Northern Ireland, is celebrating 50 years of peacemaking this year with a summer festival called Aperture – a space through which light travels (Friday 31 July to Sunday 2 August). These are almost exactly the same dates as Peace News Summer Camp (Thursday 30 July to Monday 3 August)!
…
I just read the transcript of the evidence given by John Chilcot, head of the Iraq Inquiry, to parliament's foreign affairs committee on 4 February. I was staggered to read in a footnote…
In the run-up to the publication of the Chilcot Report into the Iraq war, I've been thinking I might try to read all the evidence given during the inquiry. There's quite a lot of it up on the inquiry website. For no particular reason, I started with the evidence given in a private session by Richard Dearlove, who was head of the secret intelligence service (better known as MI6) at the time.
The…
Our first significant action was a 75 mile bike ride from central London to Atomic Weapons Establishment Burghfield from 27-28 March 2015, to protest against the possible renewal of our useless and immoral Trident nuclear weapons system at a time when the more genuine, sustainable security of strong public services and renewable energy are facing massive cuts and obstacles respectively. Nine or us were cyclists (a tenth cyclist was prevented from joining us by illness), and the others helped…
Lightning flashed across Kentucky skies a few nights ago. 'I love storms,' said my roommate, Gypsi, her eyes bright with excitement. Thunder boomed over the Kentucky hills and Atwood Hall, here in Lexington, Kentucky's federal prison. I fell asleep thinking of the gentle, haunting song our gospel choir sings: 'It's over now, It's over now. I think that I can make it. The storm is over now.'
I awoke the next morning feeling confused and bewildered. Why had the guards counted us so many…
Jody Williams spoke at the university of Winchester's Peace Jam event on 13 March. Peace Jam is a new programme launched by Winchester centre of religions for reconciliation and peace…
Peter Francis, who infiltrated anti-racism and trade union groups in the 1990s, has been at the forefront of exposing a secretive undercover unit, that targeted campaigns since 1968. It is now known that hundreds of officers from the Special Demonstration Squad were deployed across the political spectrum, many using the identities of dead children, and not a few having relationships with those they were targeting.
One officer in particular, Bob Lambert, using the stolen identity of…
