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5 July 2013News

For the first time in its 76-year history, the content in Peace News this month is entirely the work of people of colour.

This issue of PN has been commissioned and edited by a black person (co-editor Milan Rai); all the writing and the images are by people with a global majority heritage. 

This global majority issue is to accompany and be useful to Peace News Summer Camp (25-29 July, see p7) which is this year being organised by a group of global majority folk.

5 July 2013News

Turkey, Brazil and Indonesia

Taksim Gezi Park, Istanbul, 4 June 2013, before the park was cleared. Photo: James Cem Yapicioglu

In Turkey, plans to ‘develop’ Gezi Park next to Taksim Square in Istanbul sparked a two-week occupation of the square, and protests on a range of issues throughout the country. Clashes led to the deaths of three protesters and one police officer.

In Brazil, demonstrations began in reaction to planned rises in public transport fares. Even after these were cancelled, protests…

1 July 2013Feature

Peace News played an important role in exposing British colonial torture in Kenya, publishing an expose by whistle-blower Eileen Fletcher on 4 May 1956.

Fletcher went to Kenya in December 1954 as a colonial social worker ‘rehabilitating’ women and girls in British detention camps and prisons for Mau Mau militants and sympathisers. She resigned in protest after trying to improve conditions for seven months.

Labour MP Fenner Brockway waved a copy of Peace News in a house of commons debate on Kenya on 6 June 1956, quoting Fletcher.

Fletcher had witnessed children of 11 and 12 being held in prisons in Kenya, and gave details,…

24 June 2013Review

New Internationalist Publications, 2012; 72pp; £5.99

When a small group of weavers, colliers, woolsorters and cloggers opened a shop in north of England on 21 December 1844, Gabriel Carlyle writes, they can hardly have imagined the massive global impact their enterprise would ultimately have.

Though not the first consumer co-operative (Scotland’s Fenwick Weavers established an enterprise for the bulk purchasing of food in 1769), their far-sighted principles – which included not only a commitment to selling unadulterated food, but…

24 June 2013News

White flowers lie on the Conscientious Objectors Memorial Stone in Tavistock Square, London, during a ceremony on International Conscientious Objectors Day, 15 May.

The ceremony was followed by a panel discussion ‘Conscientious Objection: from personal right to universal responsibility’ with the following speakers: Albert Beale (Peace Pledge Union), Derek Brett (International Fellowship Of Reconciliation), Hannah Brock (War Resisters International), Ozgur Heval Cinar (co-author of Conscientious Objection: Resisting Militarized Society), Joe Glenton (author of Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return to the War on Terror, published on International Conscientious…

10 May 2013Feature

The uses of texting for activists

Cheap and powerful

Texting can put important or urgent information directly into your supporters’ hands. Combe Haven Defenders (CHD) are the latest campaign group to venture into mass texting of supporters – here’s how and why they do it (cheaply).

In addition to Facebook, Twitter and their Wordpress blog, CHD has relied heavily on texting to keep people updated.

Over 90% of…

9 March 2013News in Brief

A third of people in Britain are currently boycotting the products or sevices of a company because it does not pay its fair share of tax in the UK, according to a new Christian Aid survey.

Two out of three Britons believe tax avoidance is morally wrong, and 80% say that multinationals’ tax avoidance makes them feel angry.

A massive 89% of those questioned said it is unfair that they have to pay their…

9 March 2013News in Brief

Britain’s banks are avoiding billions in tax, using an accounting loophole, The Times reported on 1 March.

Banks borrow money by issuing IOUs called ‘bonds’. If confidence in a bank grows, the value of its bonds increases, and it could in theory cost more to buy back the bond than to pay off the money owed.

Using the ‘fair value on own credit’ rule, a bank could then enter a loss in its accounts. The…

9 March 2013News in Brief

The Fellowship of Reconciliation in Wales are petitioning the Welsh national assembly to stop army recruitment in schools. See Petition P-04-432 on the national assembly website and respond to the consultation letter by 16 April.

9 March 2013News in Brief

On 29 January, Swedish peace campaigner Martin Smedjeback was sentenced to 14 days in prison for an action he carried out on 29 July 2011 with Annika Spalde. The pair entered air force base F21 in Luleå in northern Sweden and painted the air strip pink.

8 March 2013News in Brief

Things are getting rather strange in Nepal, now in the seventh year of a very convoluted peace process.

The constituent assembly, elected in 2008, is now way past its legal expiry date (extended several times) and political parties have been thrashing around for months trying to agree on what to do.

The latest wheeze, suggested by the ruling Maoists, is for the current coalition to stand down, and the…

8 March 2013News in Brief

Palestinian activists erected three more tent villages on Palestinian land in February. (See PN 2554 for a report on Bab al-Shams, the first of these new Palestinian settlements.)

On 2 February, the Israeli defence forces violently evicted 200 Palestinians from just outside the village of Burin, near Nablus. They had put up two large white tents and eight metal huts.

On 8 February, a tent was set up on…

8 March 2013News in Brief

On 15 February, Washington DC police arrested 48 protesters in front of the White House, including Robert Kennedy Jr, former US president John F Kennedy’s nephew, and actor Daryl Hannah, at a demonstration against the massive XL pipeline project, which threatens to carry oil from Canadian tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico. Demonstrators had used zip-ties to attach themselves to the White House fence.

US president Barack Obama has…

8 March 2013News in Brief

On 3 February, long-term peace activists Sylvia Boyes and Mary Millington were arrested attempting to enter the Faslane nuclear submarine base one week after David Cameron pledged to increase defence spending including investment in nuclear weapons. The pair were charged with criminal damage for cutting the fence and spray-painting.

Sylvia said: ‘The building work and development for the Trident replacement at Aldermaston AWE…

8 March 2013News

Combe Haven Defenders, the Hastings anti-roads group trying to stop the building of the Bexhill-Hastings Link Road (see PN 2554), have moved their focus from the actual site of the road-building (in East Sussex) to a demand for transparency from the department for transport (in London).

The DfT were forced by a freedom of information request to release their (unenthusiastic) recommendations on the Link Road, but the document was redacted, with sections blacked…