Emily Johns
The biggest-ever US demonstration against climate change
brought 35,000 activists from 30 states to Washington DC
in February. Photo: 350.org / project survival media
The world’s most important CO2 monitoring station recorded short-term CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere above 400 parts per million (ppm), a level not seen for three million years.
Measurements at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii (and elsewhere) show CO2 concentrations…
Street art, corner of Saxon Street and Norman Road,
St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex. Photo: Milan Rai
This month, building on a wave of peace activism, a three-month peace pilgrimage will begin on the Scottish island of Iona, travelling across and then down the east coast of Scotland towards London. The message of the Pilgrimage for Peace and Economic Justice is the same as that of a series of events last month.
In April, the Scrap Trident coalition held a major…
On 23 March, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (the PKK) declared a ‘formal and clear ceasefire’ in the guerrilla war it has been fighting with the Turkish government since 1984, which has cost over 35,000 lives.
While this is the third major PKK ceasefire since 1999, there are signs that this time there may be an opportunity for a genuine peace process.
Jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan (known as ‘Apo’ or ‘uncle’) said on 21 March it was ‘time for the guns to go silent’.
…
Here is a literary biography that gripped me all the way to the end. Robert Leach describes the individual lives of the playwrights John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy, but the core of this study is their creative relationship. John started his adult life as an architect and Margaretta as an actress. In Leach’s narrative, on an evening in 1956, as John was beginning his career as a highly regarded young writer creating plays for the prestigious Royal Court Theatre, the pair made a pact that…
Susan Spencer, Patrick Bonner, Milan Rai, Emily Johns & Lois Mastrangelo (l-r) demonstrate for peace on Kadju Bridge, Isfahan, Iran, on 17 February. Photo: JNV
The latest round of negotiations on the Iranian nuclear crisis ended with modest progress, and a firm warning from the United States that: ‘the window for a diplomatic solution simply cannot by definition remain open indefinitely’ (secretary of state John Kerry, 4 March).
At the talks in…
Shredded Truth: CIA Documents — After the Iranian revolution, Iranian students seized the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979. Although US intelligence officials had shredded confidential documents as the building was being occupied, many of these memos
After a long phoney war, it seems likely that in the next 12 months there will be a serious confrontation between the US,…
They will be meeting officials, civil society groups and ordinary folk in different parts of the country. On their return they will be publishing a pamphlet about Iran, incorporating Emily’s art work from this trip and from her 2007 delegation to Iran.
The trip will cost over £2,000 each – donations to help cover the costs of travel and accommodation are very welcome.
This is a Justice Not Vengeance delegation.
TALKS
To contact Emily and Mil to book a talk in your…
In the last issue of PN, a Jewish reader wrote that she was ‘often very surprised and saddened at the extent of the anti-Jewish feeling and writing in the political Left, and in Peace News particularly’. We promised to reply this issue.
Jen asked whether there was ‘a visible and vocal place for Jews (or Arabs and Gentiles) in the peace movements in general, and in Peace News in particular, who believe in a Jewish…
The Conservative-led government is committing billions to military spending while forcing through massive cuts in jobs and services, and reducing support for badly-needed green technologies.
The government has already spent £2bn on developing and deploying pilotless drone aircraft over the past five years, using some of them to kill an unknown number of Afghan civilians…
It is not enough for the anti-cuts movement to be a defensive, responsive movement. It is not enough to point out the flaws in the arguments for austerity (as the False Economy website does so brilliantly).
If we are going to have a world worth living in, we are going to have to merge together the agendas of the anti-cuts movement, the green movement, the labour movement and the peace movement.
We are already arguing for…
Back in June, a former US presidential advisor and Harvard University professor, Graham Allison, described the current confrontation with Iran as 'a Cuban missile crisis in slow motion': 'Events are moving, seemingly inexorably, toward a showdown in which the US president will be forced to choose between ordering a military attack and acquiescing to a nuclear-armed Iran'.
(In fact…
On 27 October 1962, a Russian naval officer named Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.
Twelve US navy ships (part of the US blockade of Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis) were dropping practice depth charges on B-59, a submerged Soviet submarine, trying to signal that the sub should surface. The captain of B-59, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, panicked, believing that the Third World War had started. He gave orders to fire a nuclear torpedo, saying, according to one account: 'We're…
We’re guessing that PN readers divide roughly 50/50 on the Olympics. Half of us are blissfully ignorant of the whole thing. Half of us know varying amounts about what happened. (At a UK level, 90% of the population watched at least 15 minutes of coverage, according to the BBC.)
If you want to take the most positive, Colin Ward-ish perspective, you can cherish the fact that ‘the British nation’ has taken a black man (an immigrant from Somaliland) and a mixed-race woman to its heart, as…
Nuclear sub HMS Vanguard arrives back at
Faslane, Scotland. PHOTO: CPOA (PHOT) TAM MCDONALD
@UK MOD / CROWN COPYRIGHT
Britain may not be able to maintain its nuclear missile submarine capability because of shortages of navy and civilian personnel.
That was the stark message of the ministry of defence’s official risk register, obtained by the Nuclear Information Service (NIS) through the Freedom of Information Act. On 9 August, NIS placed on its website both the…
