Julian Assange is facing 175 years in prison for his investigative journalism if he is extradited to the US and convicted of the 18 charges filed against him by the US government.
Meanwhile, US whistleblower Chelsea Manning was jailed on 16 May for refusing (for a second time) to give evidence against the WikiLeaks founder.
Assange is being charged under the US Espionage Act 1917, mainly for obtaining…
Waging Nonviolence (WNV) has been publishing must-read reporting and analysis on nonviolent action around the world since 2009.
It started out as a blog, the brainchild of three young people: Eric Stoner, Bryan Farrell and Nathan Schneider, who all shared an interest in nonviolence and civil resistance, though each approached the topic from a slightly different angle.
Growing up in the midwest ‘with a thoroughly traditional…
This is an essential read for anybody – activists very much included – who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of the 2007–2008 economic crash and its subsequent political after-shocks, from the election of Donald Trump in the US to Brexit and rise of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.
However, first and foremost, the book is a sharp critique of the media’s coverage of the economic crisis.
As well as interviewing journalists, Laura Basu, a researcher at the Institute for…
In a tucked away corner of Rotherhithe, down a little cobbled street oozing with history, stands Sands Film Studios. Well-known amongst lefties and radicals, this unique corner of London was the perfect place to hear from a unique, leftie and often radical character, Kerry-Anne Mendoza.
Mendoza began by talking about the namesake of the lecture,…
‘The biggest immediate single problem we face… is mainstream media reporting’, British historian Mark Curtis recently argued in an Open Democracy interview about UK foreign policy.
Florian Zollmann’s deeply impressive first book – which expands on his PhD, supervised by Professor Richard Keeble – goes a long way in engaging with this long-running issue for peace activists.
‘The news media in liberal democracies operates as a propaganda system on behalf of state-…
Even the lunch break at Weaving Our Own Web spawned an additional workshop discussing ‘feminism and technology’, based on an ongoing project from The Feminist Library. Workshops were crowded with enthusiastic campaigners for Peace News’s successful digital campaigning dayschool in London on 13 January. Activists had come to build their skills in using online tools to strengthen their groups and campaign more effectively.
A range of workshops catered for a broad spectrum of…
We’ve had to postpone a major workshop to June 2018! We’re also organising a digital tools dayschool, ‘Weaving Our Own Web’, in January!
This July and August, Peace News was meant to have been hosting noted author and trainer Betsy Leondar-Wright from the US group, Class Action. We have been big fans of Betsy’s work on class and classism (while recognising that there are differences between class in the US and in the UK). We interviewed Betsy over three issues in 2015–…
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn made an extraordinary speech just days after a suicide bomber killed 22 people, nine of them teenagers, one an eight-year-old, at the end of a pop concert in Manchester on 22 May.
In his speech on 25 May, Jeremy Corbyn linked the Manchester attack to British foreign policy, breaking a deeply-held taboo in British politics. (The taboo was also broken in the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks in 2005 by a number of Conservatives, including current foreign secretary…
New Internationalist magazine has not sold out, it’s sold itself to its readers, raising £704,000 in a month-long fundraising campaign.
On 7 April, the day after the community share offer closed, NI co-director Helen Wallis wrote: ‘this email finds us audience-owned, fully capitalized and in a position to put our ambitious plans into action’.
The magazine, which had only hoped to raise £500,000, will now be owned by 3,400 investors who bought shares over the month-long…
Historically there has been a general consensus across British politics and among British political commentators that the BBC is, by and large, an independent, left-leaning institution that serves the public interest. But, as readers of PN will know, especially when it comes to issues of war and peace, this is a myth.
Since its inception, the BBC has overwhelmingly served the interests of the government and elite sectors in society, a fact backed up by virtually every…
About three years ago, two Australian campaigners were surprised and frustrated to discover that the next generation of student activists were making the very same mistakes in organising that they had made at university. Nothing seemed to have changed. A lot of people have had a similar realisation.
Unlike a lot of people, however, Keira Paterson and Sky Christensen decided to do something about it. ‘Sky had this…
Taken out of context, some of the revelations drawn from the US diplomatic cables leaked to Wikileaks sound improbable and even a bit like a conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, many of the issues highlighted in this book, – human rights abuses for instance – have already been widely reported on in the press.
So at first I was a bit doubtful about the value of this book. But in fact its purpose is not to publish secrets. Rather, it is to show what we can learn from these cables as…
Part of our politics lies in the choices we make in our day-to-day lives. Each of us is prepared to make different compromises. Many of us have changed the way we eat, the way we travel or the way we shop. Yet our choices in the world of technology, the software we use or the websites we habitually return to, remain remarkably conventional.
A hallmark of my own politics is my desire to live each day a little closer to the world I would like to build. I like to make choices by…
The internet has been transformed from a tool of emancipation ‘into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen’. Thus wrote Julian Assange* in his 2012 introduction to Cypherpunks, an eye-opening annotated transcript of a conversation between the Wikileaks founder and three other prominent internet activists.
At that time, such a claim might have appeared hyperbolic. However, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s 2013 exposure of the global surveillance…
Radical media in Britain got a huge boost on 28 February, with the Real Media gathering in Manchester.
In the ‘Sustaining independent media’ workshop, Dave Boyle of the Media Reform Coalition evangelised for radical media taking on co-operative legal forms and issuing community shares to support themselves financially.
Other workshops included ‘Media agenda: racism & sexism’, ‘Conspiracies and how to avoid them’, and ‘Chomsky’s Propaganda Model of the mass media’ (…
