David Polden
On 11 August, for the first time in 16 years of protest, peace activists completely stopped traffic into and out of Germany’s largest joint US-German air force base – for 24 hours.
Over 750 people converged on Büchel to protest against the continued storage there of 20 US nuclear weapons, in violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
After a large ‘happening’ at the main gate, teams with overnight camping gear drove to the base’s eight gates.
Each blockade was…
It was reported on 6 August, that 60 people being held in the United States military’s Guantánamo Bay detention centre were continuing a hunger strike against their continued imprisonment without trial.
The hunger strike has lasted six months and at one point involved over 100 of the 160 detainees. Many hunger strikers have suffered force-feeding, a practice widely condemned as torture.
The remaining British resident, Shaker Aamer, who has been detained for 11 years, is among…
On 17 May, the mass hunger strike at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre reached its 100th day. Over 30 detainees were reported to have been force-fed, including two British residents, Shaker Aamer and Ahmed Belbacha.
On 13 May Al Jazeera published what it claimed was an internal policy document. According to this, force-feeding involves shackling hunger strikers to a ‘restraint chair’ (for up to two hours) and forcing a tube through a nostril and down into the…
Blockading Burghfield. Photo: Action AWE
The blockaders, who ‘locked-on’ by joining their hands together inside plastic tubes, managed to stay in place for five hours before leaving. There were no arrests.
The action was part of a year-long campaign of actions organised by Action AWE, which describes itself as ‘a grassroots campaign of nonviolent actions dedicated to halting nuclear weapons production at the atomic weapons establishment (AWE) factories at Aldermaston and…
Easter Monday at Aldermaston Photo:Sue Longbottom
This year, appropriately or not, Easter Monday fell on 1 April, and CND staged a demo there entitled, ‘Stop Fooling with Nuclear Weapons’.
People from different parts of the country were assigned to various of the eight gates to the factory complex. Those of us from London were assigned to the ‘Home Office Gate’, so, before noon, the start time for the demo, I got out of one of three nearly-full 50-seat coaches from London.…
While Palestinian prisoners continue hunger strikes against their detention without trial, Israeli and Egyptian forces are using sewage against Palestinians.
Ayman Sharawna (PN 2552-53), hospitalised after a seven-month hunger strike, has agreed to confinement in Gaza for 10 years in return for his release. However, Samer Issawi, 240 days into his hunger strike, announced on 18 March that he had refused a similar deal.
Middle East News reported that, on 6…
On 12 March, demonstrators protested at Menwith Hill US spy base in Yorkshire in support of US military whistle-blower Bradley Manning, currently on trial, and against the treatment of Guantánamo Bay detainees, many of whom are hunger-striking against deteriorating prison conditions.
At Menwith Hill, they attached a banner saying ‘The Shame of Guantánamo Bay’ to the fence while one demonstrator, dressed in a hooded orange jumpsuit resembling those that…
The women were deceived into having long-term intimate relationships with undercover police officers who were infiltrating activist groups.
One of the women, who had a relationship with undercover officer Mark Kennedy, exposed by Nottingham activists in October 2010 (see PN 2528), told the house of commons home affairs select committee on 5 February: ‘We are talking about degrading and inhumane treatment. I think what happened to us has been akin to…
A petition by the parents of one of the activists gained 50,000 signatures online in its first week, and a call has gone out to shut down the annual EDF Talk Power Conference on 1 May.
Two chimneys at the West Burton gas-fired power station were occupied last October by 16 ‘No Dash for Gas’ campaigners to protest at the government’s plan to build up to 40 new gas-fired power stations (see PN 2552-2553).
On 20 February, 21 ‘No Dash for Gas’ activists…
On 10 January, over 300 Palestinians set up camp in an Israeli-occupied area north-east of Jerusalem known as ‘E1’. The Israeli government recently authorised the expansion of a large Jewish settlement in E1, which will cut Palestinian East Jerusalem off from the West Bank and make a two-state solution impossible.
The purpose of the Bab al-Shams (‘gate of the sun’) occupation was to create ‘facts on the ground’ by founding a Palestinian settlement on privately-owned Palestinian…
The protestors that day suffered ‘kettling’ (mass detention), charges by police horses and baton attacks. Alfie required emergency brain surgery after being struck by a police baton.
Like many others, Zak and Alfie were arrested and charged with serious public order offences. Some cases have resulted in prison sentences, including one of 12 months for a student for merely waving a placard stick. However, where students pleaded not guilty and described police brutality on the day,…
On 18 November, hundreds of Kurdish prisoners in Turkey ended a 68-day hunger strike at the request of Abdullah Ocalan, imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The hunger strike had spread from the prisoners to wider society, threatening a mass upheaval.
The fast began on 12 September as 670 Kurdish prisoners demanded changes in the law to allow education and court hearings in the Kurdish language, and for the start of peace talks between the PKK and the government,…
Early on 8 October, 30 people entered the proposed construction site for a new nuclear reactor at Hinkley in Somerset. Inside they scattered 577 seed balls to mark the days since the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.
Three people attached themselves to the fence with bicycle locks. After some hours the occupiers were forcibly removed. Just six were charged, some with going equipped to commit criminal damage.
The actions were part of a weekend anti-nuclear camp. There was a…
Since the beginning of September, Palestinians have regularly blocked roads in West Bank cities and held strikes, protesting at the high prices of basic necessities and the Palestinian authority’s neoliberal austerity policies, but also condemning the 1993 Oslo peace accords, particularly the ‘Paris protocol’ annex to the accords which preserves Israeli domination of the Palestinian economy.
Meanwhile, Palestinian Freedom Theatre co-founder Zakaria Zubeidi held a ‘death fast’ in…
On 13 September, a group calling itself the Diggers 2012 community won a partial victory in its struggle with the National Trust, which has been trying to evict the group from its ‘Runnymede Eco-Village’, set up in June on land near the Runnymede memorial in Surrey. The memorial commemorates the signing of the Magna Carta there in 1215, by king John.
Rather than regarding the Diggers camp as something of historical interest worth preserving, the National Trust had sought a possession…
