PN Staff

On 6 October, a plaque was put up at 3 Blackstock Road, North London, to honour the designer of the peace symbol, Gerald Holtom. It was there, in the PN office, in February 1958, that Gerald first presented sketches for the symbol to PN editor Hugh Brock and other organisers of the Direct Action Committee. They accepted the design as the theme for the first Aldermaston march for nuclear disarmament.
 

Since Palestinians began their largely nonviolent Great March of Return protests at the Gaza-Israel border fence in March, Israeli security forces have shot dead over 180 Palestinians, and injured 24,000, said the World Health Organisation on 16 November. 5,800 demonstrators have been injured by live gunfire.

According to a survey by Israeli human rights group B’Tselem of 406 Palestinians injured by live fire, most were over 30 feet from the fence when they were shot.

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Not a single national newspaper reported the National Unity Demonstration Against Racism and Fascism in central London on 17 November (though many did cover the Extinction Rebellion civil disobedience that day).

60,000 people gathered from around the country, particularly trade union branches and local Labour parties.

Speakers included Labour MP Catherine West, Labour MEP Claude Moraes, Len McCluskey of Unite the Union, and Mark Serwotka, the new president of the Trades…

More than 7,000 people marched for a free Western Sahara in an annual march in Madrid on 17 November.

While Western Sahara continues to be illegally occupied by neighbouring Morocco, it is illegal to extract resources from the territory (because there cannot be consent from the Saharawi people).

Irish/UK oil company San Leon Energy, registered on the Alternative Investment Market in London, is the only company to have drilled onshore for oil in Western Sahara during 43…

What’s been happening with the Colombian peace process since November 2016?

PN used to track the Nepali peace process, and the state of play in Colombia has some similarities to what happened in Nepal.

Disarmament of the guerrillas and the political side of the peace process have made big strides but social reforms, the integration of former fighters and ‘transitional justice’ have moved more slowly.

Eight former guerrilla leaders of the FARC (…

On 24 October, Aberystwyth peace activist Mary Millington travelled to Shrewsbury with messages for Theresa May, Jeremy Hunt and other MPs, writes Lotte Reimer. The locally-collected letters and petitions demanded that Britain sign up to the UN’s Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Having picked up more signatures at stations along the way, handed over by local activists, Mary (pictured with her placard at Shrewsbury railway station) got on the ‘…

After four years of touring, PN’s The World is My Country exhibition had its final show in Hastings from 30 October to 11 November.

Emily Johns displayed her powerful posters celebrating anti-war resistance during the First World War – and some other political and war-…

The issue of undercover policing gained more attention in June because of a brave stand by Lush, the vegetarian/vegan cosmetics company. Then the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance (COPS) and COPS Scotland held conferences in London and Glasgow on 7 July and 23 June, marking 50…

At the end of June, hundreds of people joined a mass action camp blockading energy company Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road (PNR) fracking site in Lancashire, three years after Lancashire county council rejected the company’s application to drill for shale gas.

Anti-fracking network Reclaim the Power organised ‘Block Around the Clock’ as a 48-hour non-stop non-arrestable festival of resistance…

Over 2,500 arrests were made this summer during a massive wave of nonviolent civil disobedience across the United States in a new ‘Poor People’s Campaign’, 50 years after the original campaign led by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

The original Poor People’s Campaign ended with 3,000 activists camping for six weeks in May–June 1968 on the National Mall in the centre of Washington DC.

In…

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https://peacenews.info/node/9413/ten-ways-join-climate-strikeEurope’s largest single-issue peace group, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) is joining Ethical Consumer magazine, Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham, 10:10 Climate Action and Freedom Bookshop in London, Peace News and many others in the Global Climate Strike.

Here…

At 1.30pm on 20 June, while Britain's Westminster parliament was sitting inside, 60 activists from across the UK chained themselves to the railings outside the houses of parliament in central London. They are calling for the UK to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and disarm the Trident nuclear weapon system.

This action echoes similar actions by women’s suffrage campaigners 100 years ago.

The activists from the campaign group Trident Ploughshares…

The Stop the War Coalition (STWC) took a different approach to the EU’s ‘General Data Protection Regulation’ (GDPR) from most anti-war/peace organisations.

By 25 May, as one part of GDPR, organisations in the UK (commercial and non-commercial) were meant to make sure they had explicit, positive permission from everyone on their email lists to keep their data and to keep sending them emails. (If someone has joined your group as a member, that counts, for example.)

Some…

The ‘vast majority’ of the civilians who’ve been killed and injured in the Yemen war since March 2015, ‘were as a result of airstrikes carried out by the Saudi-led coalition’, according to Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for human rights, speaking in Geneva on 11 May. That’s 10,185 Saudi-caused casualties out of 16,432.

Since the Saudi war on Yemen began, Britain has licensed £4.6bn worth of arms to Saudi Arabia, according to the Campaign Against…

In May, a Moroccan state mining company, OCP, bought back phosphate that it had illegally mined in, and shipped from, Western Sahara. Western Sahara has been illegally occupied by Morocco since 1975.

The 50,000 tonnes of phosphate rock was seized in South Africa by court order a year ago (PN 2606 – 2607). It was put up for auction back in March, with a starting price of $1 million. The proceeds were due to go to Western Sahara’s national liberation movement, the Polisario Front.…