On 7 July, the United Nations passed a treaty forbidding the development, testing, production, possession, transfer, use and threatened use of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.
Costa Rican diplomat Elayne Whyte Gómez, president of the abolition conference, said: ‘We all feel very emotional today. We feel that we are…
The European Language Equality Network met in Valencia in June for #ELEN2017, a get-together of interested parties from minority languages acting together to create an united voice.
On the top of the agenda was the effect of Brexit on the Celtic languages of the UK, including Welsh, which has recently lost its national newspaper as Y Cymro has ceased publication due to market forces. David Wyn of Cynghrair Cymunedau Cymraeg (the Alliance of Welsh Communities) explained how hate…
Image based on Jomana Abedi’s Facebook profile picture
In the first month after the attack on the Manchester Arena on 22 May, dozens of commentators offered dozens of theories on what could have led a Manchester-born-and-raised 22-year-old to massacre dozens of teenage girls and parents as they left a pop concert.
While there was a lot of confident speculation by people who never met Salman Abedi, there is one person who has spoken up who definitely knew Abedi well:
‘Abedi’s…
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 legitimacy of war; and on the museum’s side, war is not glamourised but commemorated in all its aspects. This makes it a fitting venue for a conference like the one on 10 June, especially as the…
You never actually own a lock-on....
Local families, councillors and anti-nuclear power activists joined the first days of the ‘Rolling Resistance’ month of anti-fracking action in Lancashire organised by local groups and national climate activist network Reclaim the Power.
As PN went to press, we were half-way through the month of action, which aimed to disrupt work every single day in July at the Preston New Road site near Preston, owned by oil and gas company Cuadrilla.…
Every year on 4 July, US Independence Day, there is an ‘Independence from America’ protest at the Menwith Hill US spy base on the North Yorkshire Moors. The base is run by the US national security agency and is linked to circling satellites gathering political, military and economic information that is fed to the Pentagon in the USA.
This year began with a public reading of ‘The People’s Declaration for Independence FROM America’ and the handing over of a letter to the RAF…
Aberystwyth’s Côr Gobaith made their presence felt at the annual Street Choirs Festival in Kendal at the end of June. One of three Welsh choirs, alongside Pales Peace Choir and Wrexham Community Choir, we took our messages of nonviolence, justice and environmental sustainability out onto the streets with our peace flags, pride flags and red dragons flying!
The festival has a long history of putting music into protest and for us, especially in these difficult times, the overarching…
On 1 July, I attended the so-called ‘Wales National Air Show’ in Swansea. It is marketed as a fun day out for all the family but, moving beyond the massive funfair, you find what the occasion is really about. Military hardware of every description, and information points that tell you about the delights of a career in the armed forces, with huge banners carrying the message ‘RAF: recruiting now’.
Teenagers and small children are invited aboard the tanks and troop carriers,…
The Pitchford public inquiry into undercover policing continues its frustrating, meandering path, bogged down in procedural issues.
The honest picture is that very little is coming out of the inquiry at the moment. To the alarm of many involved, we are being told that evidence is unlikely to be heard until mid-2019. That is five years after the inquiry was first announced, nine since undercover police officer Mark Kennedy was first exposed.
Much of the work done to date…
While the high court in London ruled on 10 July that arms exports to Saudi Arabia are ‘lawful’, Campaign Against Arms Trade remains confident in its legal case. We are challenging the verdict and hope that the court of appeal will overturn its ruling.
If the verdict is allowed to stand, government will regard it as a green light to keep arming human rights abusers and repressive regimes around the world. Even worse, Saudi forces will see it as a green light to continue in their…
On 22 June, the high court in London ruled that the government had acted improperly by seeking to use pension law to pursue its own foreign and arms industry policy.
In September 2016, the department for communities and local government had published some innocuously titled ‘guidance’ on investment strategies for local government pension schemes.
The DCLG wrote: ‘using pension policies to pursue boycotts, divestment and sanctions against foreign nations and UK defence…
Mark Rylance (left) and Patrick
An impressive number of people braved a forecast downpour on 15 May to commemorate Conscientious Objectors (CO) Day in Tavistock Square in central London.
The rain downgraded to a steady drizzle but maybe the news that Mark Rylance (sir Mark? We don’t do titles do we?) was going to be one of the speakers motivated people.
Mark is best known for portraying Thomas Cromwell in the BBC TV series Wolf Hall; younger readers may know him as the BFG.…
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.
Fateem Hadi Jaber and her daughter, Sameera, live on the street in Hodeidah City, Hodeidah, after fleeing their home in the neighbouring governorate of Hajjah. Hodeidah (also spelled Hudaydah) is the main port in Yemen, crucial to the international humanitarian aid effort. PHOTO © UNHCR/SHABIA MANTOO
‘The Saudi-led, Western-backed, military coalition has threatened to attack the [Yemeni] port [of Hodeidah], which would likely destroy it and cut supplies to millions of hungry…
Climate activists block the rail head terminal road at Ffos-y-frân on 21 April. PHOTO: COAL ACTION NETWORK.
On 8 May, five Welsh activists learned the price of nonviolent action they had taken in April to save lives and mitigate environmental harms. Sentencing them to 18 months’ conditional discharge, magistrates in Merthyr Tydfil also ordered them to pay compensation of £10,000 to the Miller Argent mining company plus court costs of £525.
On 21 April, environmental activists had ‘…
In April, Manchester university students organised a one-week fast in solidarity with Palestinian hunger strikers. PHOTO: MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY
As PN went to press, 850 Palestinian prisoners were entering their sixth week on hunger strike to try to get better treatment in Israeli jails.
Several dozen prisoners had been transferred to special prison wings with medical staff, according to prison officials.
The action started on 17 April, chosen as ‘Palestinian…
Three hibakusha, survivors
Three hibakusha – two survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and one of that of Nagasaki – set sail from Japan on board Peace Boat on 12 April for a 105-day global voyage.
Joined by two second generation hibakusha and two ‘youth communicators’, the delegation is visiting 22 countries, including the nuclear weapon states of France, Russia and the United States.
Ms Tsuchida Kazumi, Ms Tanaka Toshiko and Mr Mise Seeiichiro are giving personal…
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…
On 17 May, a British Muslim human rights campaigner was charged with a terrorism offence for refusing to give police the passwords to his laptop and his mobile phone.
Muhammad Rabbani, international director of the London-based human rights group CAGE, was detained and questioned at Heathrow airport in November under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
He refused to surrender his passwords on the grounds that his devices contained confidential testimony relating to torture.…
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…
