Blog posts

    07 Oct 2015

    Denise Drake

    Turning the Tide is recruiting trainers to join its volunteer training team. 

    ImageTurning the Tide supports people at the grassroots to work effectively for social change. The trainers deliver workshops and events and are supported by the community of trainers and Turning the Tide staff.

    The opportunity is open to anyone sympathetic to…

    07 Oct 2015

    Elisa Haf

    Sometimes something like a public therapy session, a feminist performance about the female body that got stronger and more daring as it went on

    Imagehoo:ha bills itself as 'comic performance art that cleverly pits funniness against sexiness in a knock-down, drag-out fight for control of the female body'. It was definitely funny, and it was often funny about sexiness, but there wasn't much of a…

    06 Oct 2015

    Elisa Haf

    A disturbing play about guns, male violence against women and sex

    ImageThis was one of the most powerful pieces of theatre I've seen in a long time. The audience was promised gun-twirlin', play-actin', and Nancy-Sinatra-dancin'. We got all those things, and we didn't get any strong swear words, explicit sexual references, nudity, or actual bloodshed. Technically, it was a show you could have…

    02 Oct 2015

    Angie Zelter

    A new Trident Ploughshares project to involve local magistrates' courts throughout Britain in the struggle against the Trident nuclear weapon system

    Trident Ploughshares has today, 1 October 2015, launched a project to encourage groups around England and Wales to go to their local magistrates court to try and initiate a citizen's prosecution against the secretary of state for defence for conspiring to commit a war crime.

    If this is done in many places, lots of local people will hear the arguments for and against Trident and the legal system will have to deal with the multiple attempts to get the courts to examine the legality of…

    02 Oct 2015

    Elisa Haf

    A funny, slightly confusing, semi-Brechtian contribution to Camden People's Theatre's feminist season, Calm Down, Dear

    ImageThis was one of those plays which makes you feel you must have missed something when you finish watching it.

    I'm reasonably confident I didn't miss something though, as the friend I watched it with had exactly the same response. It was as if the team behind '…

    01 May 2015

    PN staff

    PN in Picasso and contemporary art exhibition

     

    A reader in Germany has sent us news of PN appearing as an artefact in an art exhibition!

     

    A display case in the 'Picasso and contemporary art' exhibition in…

    01 May 2015

    PN staff

    The Corrymeela peace centre in Northern Ireland is holding a summer peace event at the same time as Peace News Summer Camp.

    Corrymeela sign

    Corrymeela Community, in County Antrim in Northern Ireland, is celebrating 50 years of peacemaking this year with a summer festival called Aperture – a space through which light travels (Friday 31 July to Sunday 2…

    24 Apr 2015

    Milan Rai

    I just read the transcript of the evidence given by John Chilcot, head of the Iraq Inquiry, to parliament's foreign affairs committee on 4 February. I was staggered to read in a footnote…

    23 Apr 2015

    Milan Rai

    A sceptical look at the evidence given to the British government's Chilcot Inquiry into the 2003 Iraq war by Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 at the time. Dearlove sticks to his WMD story but it has a big hole in it....

    In the run-up to the publication of the Chilcot Report into the Iraq war, I've been thinking I might try to read all the evidence given during the inquiry. There's quite a lot of it up on the inquiry website. For no particular reason, I started with the evidence given in a private session by Richard Dearlove, who was head of the secret intelligence service (better known as MI6) at the time.

    The…

    20 Apr 2015

    Owen Everett

    I'm one of 14 young people from different parts of the UK, most with a Quaker background or who had worked for Quakers, who formed a group called Wheel Stop Trident in early 2015.

    Our first significant action was a 75 mile bike ride from central London to Atomic Weapons Establishment Burghfield from 27-28 March 2015, to protest against the possible renewal of our useless and immoral Trident nuclear weapons system at a time when the more genuine, sustainable security of strong public services and renewable energy are facing massive cuts and obstacles respectively. Nine or us were cyclists (a tenth cyclist was prevented from joining us by illness), and the others helped…

    15 Apr 2015

    Kathy Kelly

    'Our fear and isolation from each other, aiming to get a step up above our neighbours, our reluctance to live in a shared world, may be worse than the other storms we face.' Long-time US peace activist Kathy Kelly writes from inside prison.

    Lightning flashed across Kentucky skies a few nights ago. 'I love storms,' said my roommate, Gypsi, her eyes bright with excitement. Thunder boomed over the Kentucky hills and Atwood Hall, here in Lexington, Kentucky's federal prison. I fell asleep thinking of the gentle, haunting song our gospel choir sings: 'It's over now, It's over now. I think that I can make it. The storm is over now.'

    I awoke the next morning feeling confused and bewildered. Why had the guards counted us so many…

    15 Apr 2015

    Milan Rai

    Musing on the manifesto....

    Natalie Bennett, Green Party leader, said yesterday: 'Austerity has failed and we need a peaceful political revolution to get rid of it.' Pippa Bartolotti, the leader of the Wales Green Party, said: 'We can have a peaceful…

    09 Apr 2015

    Elizabeth Ingrams

    Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams spoke recently at Winchester University.

    Jody Williams spoke at the university of Winchester's Peace Jam event on 13 March. Peace Jam is a new programme launched by Winchester centre of religions for reconciliation and peace…

    16 Mar 2015

    Peter Salmon

    As Theresa May announced a public campaign into the scandals around undercover policing, campaigners against police racism and corruption, The Monitoring Group, have launched a petition to stop the gagging of undercover whistleblower Peter Francis.

    ImagePeter Francis, who infiltrated anti-racism and trade union groups in the 1990s, has been at the forefront of exposing a secretive undercover unit, that targeted campaigns since 1968. It is now known that hundreds of officers from the Special Demonstration Squad were deployed across the political spectrum, many using…

    19 Sep 2014

    Lindis Percy, Chris Cole

    Ahead of the national demo there on 4 October, Lindis Percy and Chris Cole take a look at RAF Croughton & its role in the US drone wars.

    ImageSeemingly not many people know about ‘RAF’ Croughton near Brackley and bordering Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire. Misleadingly referred to as RAF, this important US base is occupied and controlled by the US and their agencies under the umbrella of the United States Air Force. It supports Presidential, NATO, US European Command, US Central…