The Street Choirs Festival (19-21 July) saw some 36 choirs with 700 choristers from across the UK descend excitedly on Aberystwyth. Local choir Côr Gobaith had been planning the festival for the best part of a year, taking as its theme ‘peace’.
A Friday welcome concert with local and national talent included Chocolat, Sianed Jones, and Tracey Curtis.
Saturday saw a Peace Parade from the Arts Centre to the seafront, where all the choristers took part in a massed sing. In the…
The hunger strike, which has been running for over 130 days, involves almost two-thirds of the 166 detainees.
Detainee and British resident Shaker Aamer told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal charity Reprieve, that the authorities were making cells ‘freezing cold’ and using ‘metal-tipped’ feeding tubes to try to break the will of the hunger strikers, according to a report in the Observer on 22 June.
Speaking four months after he joined the hunger…
British artist Peter Kennard responded to the G8 summit in the north of Ireland with a series of protest posters that he encouraged people to download and paste up wherever they saw fit – this poster was in Hackney. Some posters were stuck on the walls of
A group named Stop G8 occupied a former police station on Beak St in central London to be the convergence centre for their ‘Carnival Against Capitalism’.
On 11 June, 100 police officers broke into the building, removing…
Due to a misunderstanding by the PN editors, the article by Marc Morgan published in last month’s PN was an early version, which left out important information.
The fast in Paris, still organized by the Maison de Vigilance, will be held in conjunction with a fast in Burghfield held by Action AWE, and a fast at Büchel NATO base, in Germany, organized by the Atomfrei Jetzt campaign.
Fasters at the three sites will take part in symbolic actions, silent vigils and…
This issue of PN has been commissioned and edited by a black person (co-editor Milan Rai); all the writing and the images are by people with a global majority heritage.
This global majority issue is to accompany and be useful to Peace News Summer Camp (25-29 July, see p7) which is this year being organised by a group of global majority folk.
On 4 June, six Christian peace activists were held overnight after breaking into the British drones base, RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, and planting a peace garden.
The ‘Disarm the Drone Six’, who posted information about British drone warfare around the base, were marking the fifth anniversary of the first UK drone strike, and the International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression.
Susan Clarkson, Chris Cole, Henrietta Cullinan, Martin Newell, Dr Keith…
In June, a former CIA technical worker revealed US surveillance tactics, allowing the government access to phone records, individually stored data, and the servers of large social networking sites.
Whistle-blower Edward Snowden disclosed documents to WikiLeaks, calling the tactics of the US national security agency (NSA) ‘horrifying.’
Under the ‘Prism’ programme, which has been running since 2007, the NSA has access to the servers of Microsoft, YouTube, Skype, Facebook…
Taksim Gezi Park, Istanbul, 4 June 2013, before the park was cleared. Photo: James Cem Yapicioglu
In Turkey, plans to ‘develop’ Gezi Park next to Taksim Square in Istanbul sparked a two-week occupation of the square, and protests on a range of issues throughout the country. Clashes led to the deaths of three protesters and one police officer.
In Brazil, demonstrations began in reaction to planned rises in public transport fares. Even after these were cancelled, protests…
Then, just as suddenly, the talks seemed to be called off — by the Kabul administration.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai was said to have been offended by the way that the Taliban’s political office in Qatar had been officially opened on 18 June, with the raising of the white Taliban flag, and many references to the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’, the name used by the Taliban during its five years in government.
The Taliban officials who presided over the opening…
The ceremony was followed by a panel discussion ‘Conscientious Objection: from personal right to universal responsibility’ with the following speakers: Albert Beale (Peace Pledge Union), Derek Brett (International Fellowship Of Reconciliation), Hannah Brock (War Resisters International), Ozgur Heval Cinar (co-author of Conscientious Objection: Resisting Militarized Society), Joe Glenton (author of Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return to the War on Terror, published on International Conscientious…
Faslane Peace Camp, May 2013. Photo: Camcorder Guerrillas
Newspapers across the world published articles indicating the camp would likely close, and activist groups across the country publicised our plight.
The final meeting held yesterday [14 May – eds] saw many individuals, including past and present residents, travel from all over the UK to offer their time and support to keep the camp running.
It has been widely agreed that it would be a bad move to close the camp…
In May 2010, Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst in the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division, was arrested on suspicion of leaking nearly half a million government documents, including the infamous ‘Collateral Murder’ gunsight video and 260,000 State Department cables.
After nine months in solitary confinement, he awaits court-martial in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He is 24 and from Crescent, Oklahoma. Bradley Manning’s mother, Susan, is from Wales and Bradley attended secondary…
On 17 May, the mass hunger strike at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre reached its 100th day. Over 30 detainees were reported to have been force-fed, including two British residents, Shaker Aamer and Ahmed Belbacha.
On 13 May Al Jazeera published what it claimed was an internal policy document. According to this, force-feeding involves shackling hunger strikers to a ‘restraint chair’ (for up to two hours) and forcing a tube through a nostril and down into the…
Blockading Burghfield. Photo: Action AWE
The blockaders, who ‘locked-on’ by joining their hands together inside plastic tubes, managed to stay in place for five hours before leaving. There were no arrests.
The action was part of a year-long campaign of actions organised by Action AWE, which describes itself as ‘a grassroots campaign of nonviolent actions dedicated to halting nuclear weapons production at the atomic weapons establishment (AWE) factories at Aldermaston and…
Anti-road protesters in Hastings are celebrating the release of embarrassing secret information about the £100m Bexhill-Hastings link road (BHLR), and the dropping of charges against many direct actionists.
Out of a total of 17 activists awaiting trial for nonviolent direct action, 13 had been charged with ‘obstructing an enforcement officer engaged to execute a high court writ’. On 15 May, these charges were dropped, leaving the 13 charged only with ‘…
As European countries step up their lobbying of the US to sell them armed drones, German activists have been leading the charge against the ‘competitive rush of governments in Europe and elsewhere to acquire and use’ the robotic killing machines.
On 30 April, during a visit to Washington by the German defence minister Thomas de Mazière to meet his US counterpart Chuck Hagel, Der Spiegel reported that the US was ready to approve a German request for three armed…
A US state has begun examining the conversion of military industry to socially-useful production. On 14 May, the Connecticut legislature created a ‘futures commission’ which will draw up a strategy for ‘the diversification or conversion of defense-related industries with an emphasis on encouraging environmentally-sustainable and civilian product manufacturing’.
This follows the success of a ballot in November, in New Haven, Connecticut, on the question: ‘Shall…
‘Ah, here they are!’
As the bearded South Asian gentleman and the young woman in her 20s hoved into view, clutching their coffees, our coach driver fired up the engine.
It was 8.50am, and having travelled up to London the night before and slept on a floor to guarantee making the 8.30 rendezvous, I was somewhat peeved that we still hadn’t left.
‘Why did we wait for these two?’ I mused uncharitably,…
For the last two years, there has been a small group of us rebuilding Faslane Peace Camp as a community of anti-nuclear action.
We came together with a shared vision that if we maintain the camp as a safe, alcohol- and drug-free space with regular actions and campaigning, we could create a strong, autonomous community active in the fight against Trident and the militarisation of the west coast of Scotland.
Part of our vision has been achieved in making the…
All gates into the base were blockaded for three hours on a Monday morning, from 7am to 10am. Those arrested ranged in age from 19 to 83 and came from across Scotland, Wales and England.
Students, pensioners, environmentalists and activists from a dozen campaign groups and political parties lay down in the entrance to the base and locked themselves together with metal and plastic tubes, chains and ‘thumb-cuffs’ (handcuffs for thumbs). They demanded the UK disarm the Trident weapons…
