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On 12 February, dozens of constituents gathered in Tackleway, outside the official Hastings residence of home secretary and Hastings MP, Amber Rudd, to demand that she continue with a scheme to bring unaccompanied child refugees to Britain. Photo: Milan Rai

Two sets of drone resisters in New York state, USA, walked free from court, after a ‘not guilty’ verdict on 2 March, and the dismissal of separate charges on 10 March.

In the first case, Daniel Burns, Brian Hynes, Ed Kinane and James Ricks were found ‘not guilty’ by a jury in Dewitt town court. They had been charged with obstruction of government administration,…

Airstrike in Sana’a, Yemen, 11 May 2015. Photo: Ibrahem Qasim (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

26 March marked two years since the Saudi-led bombardment of Yemen began. Since then, 10,000 people have been killed and millions have been left without access to vital infrastructure, clean water or electricity. An estimated 17 million people are food-insecure and require urgent humanitarian assistance

For decades now, Saudi Arabia has been by far the largest buyer of UK arms. The…

Nonviolent Palestinian activists are facing a new wave of repression, demonstrating again that the Israeli authorities fear effective nonviolent action.

Israeli officials themselves know ‘we don’t do Gandhi very well’, as the then director of policy and political-military affairs at the Israel ministry of defence, major general (reserves) Amos Gilad, said in February 2010. Gilad, who retired in February after 14 years in that critical post, was talking to US officials about the…

On 11 March, a conference entitled ‘Green Nuclear-Free Wales’ drew more than 60 delegates to the National Library in Aberystwyth on the sixth anniversary of the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster (in March, a Japanese court ruled that state negligence contributed to the triple meltdown).

Speakers in Aberystwyth included the former chief electrical engineer for Hinkley Point, Peter Smith, who critiqued nuclear industry safety…

In the wake of the Westminster terror attack, British society needs ‘courageous introspection’, and ‘a re-examination of the neo-conservative and violent Western foreign and domestic policy towards Muslims’.

That was the response of CAGE, a Muslim NGO ‘working to empower communities impacted by the War on Terror’, to the car-and-knife attack in London on 22 March which had led to five deaths by the time of going to press.

CAGE pointed to ‘the death this month of at…

On 7 March, a US district judge refused the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s attempt to stop oil flowing through a part of the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) near their reservation.

The Sioux thought they had won on 4 December when the US army corps of engineers stopped construction of DAPL for alternative routes to be considered. Then, on 24 January, US president Donald Trump signed an executive decree ordering the secretary of the army to expedite approval of the pipeline – without a…

On 3 March, Llandudno town council condemned the ‘inappropriate Zionist exploitation of Conwy HMD 2017’ and voted to cancel the grant it had allotted to one Roy Thurley for organising the event.

Every 27 January, the date that the Russian army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1945, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust asks people to ‘pause to remember the millions of people who have been murdered or whose lives have been changed beyond recognition during the Holocaust,…

On 24 March, Airwars, a transparency NGO monitoring civilian casualties from international airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Libya, sent out an email warning that the escalation of US strikes was threatening to overwhelm its capacity to monitor and assess the civilian impact.

Airwars wrote: ‘Following an unprecedented number of alleged Coalition civilian casualty events and casualties in recent weeks, Airwars has taken the difficult decision to suspend detailed assessing of alleged…

In Scotland, peace activists connected to Faslane Peace Camp have blockaded the Faslane Trident submarine base, held an open day as part of the camp’s 35th birthday celebrations. Oh, and halted a nuclear warhead convoy.

The 2 February blockade was carried out by five peace campers who ‘locked-on’ to each other by chaining…

On 14 January, campaigners from around the country got together in the beautiful Ecology Centre in Islington, London. The aim? To get people trained and ready to give great workshops on stopping the DSEI arms fair before it opens its doors.

Every two years one of the world’s largest arms fairs comes to the UK, and the countdown to the next one is on. This September, Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI, pronounced by some campaigners as ‘dicey’) comes to London…

One of Britain’s oldest activist training organisations has divided into two. Seeds for Change used to have two groups, one in Oxford, one in Lancaster. As reported last issue, Seeds for Change (Oxford) has become ‘Navigate’; and Seeds for Change (Lancaster) has become just ‘Seeds for Change’.

Seeds for Change say: ‘Towards the middle of last year, Seeds for Change Oxford and Lancaster realised we’d be able to offer more on-the-ground support through a looser relationship with…

As PN went to press, the Civil March for Aleppo had been walking for 28 days through the European winter in protest against the bombing of civilians in Syria. Having left Berlin, Germany, on 26 December, dozens of marchers had reached Ledec nad Sazavou in the centre of the Czech Republic. The intention is to walk for over three months, for over 2,000 miles, into Syria.

The organisers’ founding statement says: ‘We are going to Aleppo. From…

A protest action in 1988 in which Phill Jones, Chipper Mills, and Tony Vallance from Faslane Peace Camp managed to get into the control room of one of the UK’s nuclear-armed submarines left British prime minister Margaret Thatcher ‘utterly horrified’, according to secret cabinet offices papers published by the National Archives on 29 December.

The papers describe how, at 1.15am on 10 October 1988, the three successfully broke into Faslane naval base north of Glasgow, climbed into…

This year, Peace News is changing. We’re going to be more focused in the paper and on the web; we have new folk coming onto the board of Peace News Ltd; we want to be doing more events around Britain; and we want to move forward with Zylum, our super-easy-to-use set of online tools for grassroots campaigners.

PN will have some core themes for the paper for the year, including nonviolent revolution; class and classism; and the British-supported war in…

Image La Linière refugee camp near Dunkirk, France. Photo: Mid-Wales Refugee Action

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Lotte Reimer: In December, a group of volunteers from Mid-Wales Refugee Action went to work at La Linière refugee camp near Dunkirk, France. Mainly from Machynlleth and the surrounding area, they brought much needed supplies of sleeping bags, blankets and clothes donated by people across mid-Wales. For a week, they volunteered with Kesha Niya, a…

On 14 December, the trial of five Quaker protesters ended on its first day because the police sergeant who arrested the five failed to state in his testimony that he held a ‘reasonable belief’ that aggravated trespass had occurred. The judge stated there was no case to answer and acquitted the whole group.

Ellis Brooke, Hannah Brock, Gillian Lawrence, John Lynes, and Sam Donaldson had pleaded not guilty, and decided on a defence that their right to freedom of belief was enough…

Women’s marches on 21 January took place on seven continents and involved over five million marchers, according to the organisers of the Women’s March on Washington, to show that ‘women’s rights are human rights’ and more: ‘We stand together, recognizing that defending the most marginalized among us is defending all of us.’

There were marches in Antarctica, Belarus, Botswana, the Congo, Costa Rica, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Macau,…

In 2015, there was one death for every 269 arrivals. This year, the UN reports, the rate for migrants crossing the Mediterranean has risen to one death for 88 arrivals.

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Aberystwyth and the city of Hiroshima were symbolically linked when a local peace activist visited the Japanese city on 26 October. Wishing for peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons, Ian Bell brought paper cranes from the peace tree in Aberystwyth to The Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.

Sadako Sasaki, who was two years old when the world’s first atom bomb was dropped over the city of…