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On 16 June, acquittals were handed out to four Australians who broke into a top secret spy base on Swan Island, Victoria, and disrupted satellite communications with Australian troops operating in Afghanistan.

Christian peace activists Jacob Bolton, Jessica Morrison, Simon Moyle, and Simon Reeves told Geelong court that they were pleading guilty, not out of a sense of emotional guilt, but because they wanted to take full responsibility for their actions.

Having heard…

The EDO Decommissioners (see PN 2506) spent the first week of their trial grilling the head of EDO/MBM, Paul Hills, on the firm’s supply of vital components to Israeli F-16 fighter jets (which Hills denied).

After nine days, on 16 June, Brighton peace activist Rosa Bellamy was cleared of conspiracy to participate in the property destruction inside the EDO/MBM arms factory in January 2009. The action took place as Israeli F-16s were bombing Gaza, killing hundreds of civilians.…

The US is doing its best, once again, to prevent a negotiated solution to the Iran crisis. On 17 May, Brazil and Turkey pulled off a major diplomatic coup by reaching agreement with Iran on swapping Iranian uranium fuel for more highly-enriched fuel for a medical reactor, designed to produce medical isotopes used in diagnosing cancers.

Iran accepted conditions it had previously rejected as humiliating (see PN 2522 for details). It agreed to deliver 1,200kg of low-enriched uranium to…

It’s the time of year for festivals again, and through the weekend of 16-18 April visitors to the old farm buildings of Neuadd Hendre, near Bangor in Gwynedd, could enjoy top Welsh bands, listen to the edgy and moving stand-up comedy of Ivor Dembina and eat fantastic Palestinian food, while camping in the spring sunshine with panoramic views across the Irish Sea. But this was a festival with a difference. It had an agenda – Palestine.

The Bangor to Bethlehem international…

Public shareholders of RBS put the case for sustainable investment at the bank’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Edinburgh on 28 April. Since the bank bailout in 2008 the UK government owns 84% of RBS shares, effectively taking the bank into public ownership.

However, the public who amassed outside Edinburgh International Conference Centre, many suited and booted for the occasion, held their meeting from behind police barriers.

The meeting was supported by the World…

Scottish CND held a post-election conference in Glasgow on 15 May to discuss the consequences for lobbying against Trident renewal in the new parliamentary world of the Lib-Con alliance.

Initial gate

John Ainslie, SCND co-ordinator, started with the projected timescales and costs of Trident replacement. According to the MoD’s 2006 guidelines, the design phase of Trident renewal should have commenced last year. However, the “initial gate” decision which would have given the…

Undeterred by a car bomb that failed to detonate the night before, thousands filled New York’s Times Square on 2 May to protest against a far more destructive bomb.

The International Day of Action for a Nuclear-Free World saw a 15,000 protesters from around the world rally and then march to the UN headquarters, where the month-long NPT review conference was to be held.

There were over 2,000 marchers from Japan alone. Hundreds of organisations were represented,…

International Conscientious Objectors’ Day is marked around the world each year on 15 May. This year, London held a ceremony in Tavistock Square, where those who faced death for maintaining the right to refuse to kill were remembered.

Cardiff organised an event with speakers from Movement for the Abolition of War, the Peace Tax Seven and CND. In the US, in the San Francisco Bay area, 14 May saw an afternoon of performance art and short films celebrating growing opposition to war…

Eight ships are at the time of writing preparing to try to take badly-needed supplies into Gaza, in defiance of the Israeli naval blockade.

The convoy is the fruit of an international coalition involving the Free Gaza Movement (FGM), the European Campaign to Break the Siege of Gaza, the Greek and Swedish Ship to Gaza Campaigns and IHH, a Turkish campaign. FGM has organised eight similar missions to Gaza in the past three years, the first five successfully.

The last…

A new anti-nuclear movement, “Stop Nuclear Power”, has organised two protest camps at Sizewell, the intended site for one of the first of a new wave of UK nuclear power plants. The second camp took place on 23-26 April, around the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

Over 50 protesters and a nuclear white elephant camped on power station property near existing reactors. There were workshops, a tour of the proposed new reactor site, and a blockade using tape labelled “nuclear…

The Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar, “has given his approval for talks aimed at ending the war in Afghanistan and allowed his representatives to attend Saudi-sponsored peace negotiations” (Sunday Times, 15 March).

In April, two of the Taliban’s senior Islamic scholars told the Sunday Times “that their military campaign has only three objectives: the return of sharia (Islamic law), the expulsion of foreigners and the restoration of security”, and that the Taliban’s supreme…

British troops could be moved from Helmand to Kandahar, locking in a British presence in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future.

According to media reports, the RAF’s ground fighting force and UK special forces will both take part in the forthcoming Kandahar offensive.

However, the Telegraph has also speculated that British troops could be moved wholesale from Helmand – where they are now outnumbered by US forces – to Kandahar, “where they could run their own show”.…

On 26 April, people involved in the Rising Tide Network literally put their necks on the line by blockading the railway line which carries coal from the controversial open-cast mine at Ffos-y-Frân in Merthyr Tydfil to Aberthaw power station, the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in Wales.

It took the combined efforts of British Rail police and South Wales police over eight hours to remove the protesters. Eighteen people from Bristol and Bath were charged under the Malicious Damages…

Aberystwyth Peace and Justice Network got the election ball rolling in March, organising a peace and justice hustings in the Morlan Centre.

Prospective parliamentary candidates Mark Williams (Lib Dem), Penri James (Plaid Cymru), Richard Boudier (Labour) and Luke Evetts (Conservative) turned up for a grilling from the audience. Typically, the Labour and Conservative candidates, who stand no chance of winning the seat, were politically-inexperienced young men.

The…

The six EDO Decommissioners, who caused £300,000 damage to the EDO MBM arms factory in Brighton to protest against the war on Gaza, go to trial on 17 May. They are charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage.

The trial will be held at Hove Crown Court on Lansdowne Road BN3 3BN. There will be a solidarity demonstration at 10am on the Monday morning.

Because the courtroom lacks a large public gallery, people are also encouraged to turn up throughout the trial to…

The MoD Watchkeeper drone programme is beginning trials at ParcAberporth using the Israeli-built Hermes 450 UAV (“Unmanned Arial Vehicle”). Watchkeeper is not about agricultural and environmental monitoring, oceanographic and atmospheric data collection or grassland management, it is about “intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and target acquisition”.

Which, in plain English, means locating people and killing them.

So I’m not going to waste your time moaning…

The CIA is worried that “a spike in French or German casualties or in Afghan civilian casualties could become a tipping point in converting passive opposition into active calls for immediate withdrawal”, according to a confidential document leaked to the Swedish-based online organisation Wikileaks.

According to the “Red Cell Memorandum”, dated 11 March 2010 and marked NOFORN (“no foreign nationals”), the CIA has privately recommended a “strategic communication program across…

On 8 April, Britain became the first country in the world to ban profiteering in “third world debt”, in the final hours of the last parliament. The Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Bill restricts the activities of so-called “vulture funds”. These funds are (generally secretive) investment companies that buy up the bad debts of some of the world’s poorest countries at a discount, and then use the courts to demand full repayment plus costs.

Last November, the British high court…

On 31 March, four Christian peace activists broke into a secret Australian military base in a protest against the war in Afghanistan. The four swam to Swan Island off the south coat of Australia at 5.30am, climbed the fence and spent several hours on the base shutting down the switchboard, a satellite and causing a lockdown on the base, effectively disrupting the Australian war effort in Afghanistan.

“Both Swan Island and the war on Afghanistan are out of sight, out of mind. It’…

Edinburgh’s first “Celebrating Cultures of Resistance” all-day film festival took place on 20 March at the Banshee Labyrinth, a unique venue near the Royal Mile. Organised by the local Anarchist Federation group and supported by AK Press and the local Solidarity with the Serbian 6 campaign, the event was a big success.

And this despite an error on the publicity that listed the starting time an hour too early! Organisers met would-be filmgoers outside the venue and had to ask them to…