PN

Elizabeth McAlister:

Absurd Convictions, Modest Hopes is the title of one of the more than 50 books by my late brother-in-law Daniel Berrigan (RIP and Presente!). It might be fair to say that we came to Kings Bay submarine base animated by the absurd conviction that we could make some impact on slowing, if not ending, the mad…

Dramatic developments in the #spycops scandal unfolded on 21 March, when people targeted by undercover police, their lawyer and their supporters walked out of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) being held at the high court in London.

Baroness Doreen Lawrence backed the walk-out, saying that the chair of the inquiry, sir John Mitting, was…

Extracts from Andy Coles’ SDS Tradecraft Manual. See accompanying article for background.

3.8.4. Once you have been armed with an easy to remember personal history you may never use it. It is highly unlikely that within a very short time as a field officer you will face hostile questioning in such depth. Nevertheless, an intensely secretive individual who never gives…

80 LGBT+ rights defenders protested outside Westminster Abbey as the queen and the prime minister celebrated Commonwealth Day on 12 March, ahead of a Commonwealth summit in April. The Commonwealth Equality Network and 14 other groups demanded gay rights including the decriminalisation of same-sex relations in 37 of the 53 Commonwealth nations. Photo: Peter Tatchell Foundation

Do you want to strengthen your workshop facilitation skills? Do you want to help social change groups and mission-driven NGOs deal more skilfully with social class and classism in their own organisations, in their members’ lives and in the wider society? If so, Exploring Class may be for you.

This intensive, three-day Training of Trainers draws on several decades of work in the US and will adapt US tools to the UK class system. This residential draws in particular from the…

On 25 January, Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, announced: ‘Because of the extraordinary danger of the current moment, the Science and Security Board [of the Bulletin] today moves the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock 30 seconds closer to catastrophe. It is now two minutes to midnight – the closest the clock has ever been to Doomsday, and as close as it was in 1953, at the height of the Cold War.’

The central concern of the…

Between 17–20 January, the Israeli army closed all three road entrances to Hizma, a village in the West Bank near Jerusalem, home to over 7,300 people, writes David Polden. They kept its main entrance closed for another eight days. The Israeli army stated that this was a response to stone- throwing from the village toward Israeli settler vehicles travelling past the village.

Restricting the freedom of movement of some 7,000 people constitutes collective punishment, which is…

On 28 December, 63 Israeli teenagers signed an open letter to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring that they will refuse military service because the Israeli army ‘carries out a racist government policy that enforces one legal system for Israelis and another for Palestinian in the same territory’. The 63 say they will not take any part in ‘the occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people’.

As the Israeli army does not recognise conscientious objection based…

On 28 November, 22 Greenpeace activists broke into the French four-reactor nuclear power plant, Cruas-Meysse. Four scaled the walls of a building containing pools used to cool highly-radioactive spent fuel rods, and set off flares.

Greenpeace claimed that this incursion highlighted security shortcomings at the facility, proving that security around spent nuclear fuel pools is particularly lacking and that France’s 58 nuclear reactors are vulnerable to attack.

In October…

Nukewatch report that the first British nuclear warhead convoy of 2018 took a new route from the nuclear bomb factory in Burghfield in Berkshire, England, to the Coulport nuclear weapons store north of Glasgow, Scotland.

Four warhead carriers left Burghfield on 31 January. After a break at Glencorse Barracks, south of Edinburgh, the convoy departed from its usual route: ‘Unusually it then took the M8 west passing Livingston and Bathgate, and then through the centre of Glasgow…

For many years, PN has been keeping an eye on the Nepali peace process, which has progressed in fits and starts since the Nepali civil war came to an end in 2006.

In early February, Nepal held elections for its new upper chamber under its new federal constitution. The alliance between the Maoist Centre party and the United Marxist-Leninists (UML) swept the board, taking 40 of the 56 seats. In elections in November and December, the leftist alliance took 174 out of 275…

PN also keeps watch on the struggle for freedom in Western Sahara, illegally occupied by Morocco since 1975.

Solidarity campaigners has been targeting foreign companies involved in the illegal exploitation of Saharawi resources. In the last few months, several have pulled out.

The giant Swiss/British multinational Glencore finally left on 4 January (it had been exploring for oil). The Canadian firm Nutrien announced on 25 January that it would no longer buy…

Do you want to strengthen your workshop facilitation skills? Do you want to help social change groups and mission-driven NGOs deal more skilfully with social class and classism in their own organisations, in their members’ lives and in the wider society? If so, Exploring Class may be for you.

This intensive, three-day Training of Trainers draws on several decades of work in the US and will adapt US tools to the UK class system. This residential draws in particular from the…

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament nearly put itself out of business right at the beginning of its life.

CND started near St Paul’s cathedral, London, on 16 January 1958 at a meeting of the National Council for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapon Tests (NCANWT) and an invited group of national figures. NCANWT willingly handed over its office, its funds, its files, its paid organiser, and a public meeting it had organised for 17 February, to the new ‘Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament…

As PN went to press, the Public Interest Case Against Trident (PICAT) project was well on its way to raising £10,000 towards the cost of taking out a judicial review.

PICAT has been trying to start a prosecution of the prime minister and the defence secretary for conspiracy to commit war crimes, through Britain’s nuclear weapons policy. (See PN 2612 – 2613.)

They now want to a judicial review of the attorney general’s refusal to allow this case to go…