PN Staff

PN Staff

PN staff

1 February 2023News

British weapons, advisers and diplomatic support have contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths

After eight years of war, the people of Yemen are enduring one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Oxfam says that ‘24 million people – 80 percent of Yemen’s population – need emergency aid, the greatest number in any country in the world.’

A quarter of the population is malnourished.

There were some signs of hope in January; a new truce may be agreed soon between the Saudi-led coalition and their Houthi opponents.

However, according to one study, there have been…

2 January 2023News

Britain to send Ukraine depleted uranium weapons along with Challenger tanks

Britain is sending uranium weapons to be used in Ukraine. That was revealed in a parliamentary written answer from junior defence minister baroness Annabel Goldie on 20 March, first reported by Declassified UK the next day. 

The advanced Challenger 2 tanks that Britain is exporting to Ukraine will be sent with 

CHARM 3 armour-piercing depleted uranium (DU) rounds, Goldie confirmed.

CND general secretary Kate Hudson responded: ‘Like in Iraq, the addition of depleted…

1 December 2022Feature

The peace movement has a window of opportunity to press the government

Despite pleading from defence secretary Ben Wallace, there was no increase in British military spending in the government’s November budget (officially an ‘autumn statement’).

Wallace, a popular Conservative MP, had previously warned that he would resign if the government did not commit itself to increasing military spending to three percent of GDP. (British spending has been at the NATO target of two percent of GDP.)

Chancellor of the exchequer Jeremy Hunt instead said on 17…

1 December 2022News

New campaign needed to support financing for the Global South

‘The ultimate test of this COP is that it has responded to the voices of the climate vulnerable by establishing a fund for loss and damage.’ That was Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s minister for climate change, speaking at the closing session of COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on 20 November, on behalf of most of the Global South – she was representing the G77/China* group.

Here in the UK, Friends of the Earth welcomed the fund as ‘a first step towards wealthy nations providing loss and…

1 December 2022News

Twenty-eight activists already recruited for unarmed team

28 peace activists have volunteered to act as an unarmed civilian protection team at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in Ukraine.

John Reuwer, founder of the Zaporizhzhya Protection Proposal project, writes: ‘Among the most immediate of the many threats faced by Ukrainians is the release of a nuclear dirty bomb by an intentional or accidental mishap at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant.’

The group plans to send a team of trained unarmed civilians to support inspectors…

1 December 2022News

Call for US to release billions of assets belonging to Afghanistan's central bank

This winter, Afghanistan faces a humanitarian catastrophe, largely due to the collapse of the economy because of the freezing of the country’s foreign reserves by the United States and other Western countries.

On 16 November, 12 countries in the region called on the US to unfreeze billions of dollars of assets belonging to Afghanistan’s central bank. They were meeting in Russia as ‘the Moscow format of consultations on Afghanistan’, first set up in 2017. The 12 included Saudi Arabia…

1 December 2022News

Report assesses impact of nonviolent action

‘Although it is difficult to evaluate it precisely, the nonviolent civil resistance has contributed to stopping the invasion in the north’ of Ukraine.

That’s one of the conclusions of Ukrainian Nonviolent Civil Resistance in the Face of War, published in October by the International Catalan Institute for Peace and Novact – International Institute for Nonviolent Action.

The author, Felip Daza, studied 235 nonviolent actions between 24 February – 30 June.

1 December 2022News

Zombies visit Home Office over Public Order Bill

Zombies visited the Home Office on 29 November with a gravestone saying: ‘Public Order Bill – Stay Dead’. They were there to hand in a petition (organised by Greenpeace and Liberty) signed by over 300,000 people, calling on the home secretary to stop attacking the basic human right to peaceful protest.

That day, the Public Order bill was having its second reading in the House of Lords. It contains restrictions on protest that had been removed from the Police, Crime, Sentencing and…

1 December 2022News

US campaigners call for end to 'brutal' embargo

US peace group CODEPINK is calling on the US to respond to the wave of women-led protests in Iran by lifting ‘the brutal sanctions that harm millions of Iranian women every day’.

At least 448 people have been killed by Iranian security forces during the nationwide protests which began with the death of Mahsa Amini in mid-September, the NGO Iran Human Rights reported on 29 November.

In late September, Palestinian-Indian-American journalist Samaa Khullar wrote in Salon…

1 December 2022News

Lakenheath protest against return of US nuclear weapons to the UK 

Hundreds of people gathered outside Lakenheath, the US air force (USAF) base in Suffolk, at a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) demonstration on 19 November.

They were protesting against the return of US nuclear weapons to the UK.

Originally scheduled for spring 2023, the arrival of the new B61-12 free-fall/glide nuclear bomb at USAF Lakenheath seems to have been brought forward to December.

Speakers at the demo included CND chair Tom Unterrainer, Trident…

1 December 2022News

UK government ditches plans for embassy move

The British embassy in Israel will not be moving to Jerusalem.

During the Conservative party leadership contest in the summer, both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak expressed support for the move.

While prime minister, Truss ordered a review, but, on 2 November, a spokesperson for Rishi Sunak told the London-based New Arab news site: ‘There are no plans to move the UK embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv.’

The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians had warned in…

1 October 2022News

Extra captions added to Shell-sponsored exhibition

On 10 September, some extra captions and exhibits were added to the Shell-sponsored carbon capture exhibition at the Science Museum, London.

Artist Darren Cullen (AKA Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives) ‘thought it was weird that an exhibition about carbon capture, paid for by an oil company, didn’t once mention that 81% of all the carbon ever captured by this technology has been used by oil companies and pumped back into oil wells to help extract more oil’.

He decided to correct…

1 October 2022Feature

New call-up prompts mass protests

Anti-war campaigners took to Russia’s streets on 21 September after the government there announced that it would be calling up 300,000 reservists to fight in its ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Brutal repression had put a stop to mass protests earlier in the year (see PN 2659), but the new announcement led to a new surge in protests.

It was reported that, in the hours after president Vladimir Putin’s speech on television launching the new policy, at least 300 people…

1 October 2022News

This autumn sees a burst of activity in Britain over Western Sahara, ‘Africa’s last colony’ – in court, in parliament, in conference and in supermarkets

Western Sahara, which has been illegally occupied by Morocco since 1975, saw a long ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario liberation front, from 1991 until 2020, when Morocco moved forces into a UN-patrolled buffer zone (PN 2648 – 2649). Scattered fighting is continuing in border areas.

Recently, Moroccan security forces mounted a brutal campaign against a Sahrawi human rights activist, Sultana Khaya, including beatings and sexual assault (PN 2661).

1 October 2022News

US voters back diplomatic solution to Ukraine crisis

Image Click on the image to enlarge it.

Most people in the US support their government pursuing diplomatic negotiations as soon as possible to end the war in Ukraine, ‘even if it means Ukraine making some compromises with Russia’ (see graphic above).

When Data for Progress asked the question in a slightly different way, an even larger majority of…