PN Staff

On 16 April, hundreds protested in Parliament Square, London, after 100 missiles were fired at targets inside Syria two days earlier by Britain, France and the US. The three governments claimed to have proof that the Syrian government was responsible for chemical weapons attacks the previous week in Douma, on the outskirts of Damascus. Inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons collected samples from Douma…

As PN went to press, the French government was expected to try again to evict la ZAD (‘the zone to be defended’), a huge occupied site near Nantes in western France.

As reported previously, the French government officially abandoned plans to build an airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in January, but confirmed that it wanted to clear the ZAD. (PN 2616–2617)

A massive eviction operation failed in April (as it did in 2012), though more than 300 zadistes…

Thousands of flasks of radioactive uranium hexafluoride (‘hex’) are transported down country lanes every year from the Springfields nuclear fuel plant near Preston, Lancs. Fuel rods and other nuclear materials are taken to nuclear power plants in the UK and around the world, including Russia.

A new report from the Close Capenhurst Campaign, Kick Nuclear and Radiation Free Lakeland shines a ‘Spotlight on Springfields’:
www.tinyurl…

The Stop the War Coalition (STWC) took a different approach to the EU’s ‘General Data Protection Regulation’ (GDPR) from most anti-war/peace organisations.

By 25 May, as one part of GDPR, organisations in the UK (commercial and non-commercial) were meant to make sure they had explicit, positive permission from everyone on their email lists to keep their data and to keep sending them emails. (If someone has joined your group as a member, that counts, for example.)

Some…

The ‘vast majority’ of the civilians who’ve been killed and injured in the Yemen war since March 2015, ‘were as a result of airstrikes carried out by the Saudi-led coalition’, according to Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for human rights, speaking in Geneva on 11 May. That’s 10,185 Saudi-caused casualties out of 16,432.

Since the Saudi war on Yemen began, Britain has licensed £4.6bn worth of arms to Saudi Arabia, according to the Campaign Against…

In May, a Moroccan state mining company, OCP, bought back phosphate that it had illegally mined in, and shipped from, Western Sahara. Western Sahara has been illegally occupied by Morocco since 1975.

The 50,000 tonnes of phosphate rock was seized in South Africa by court order a year ago (PN 2606 – 2607). It was put up for auction back in March, with a starting price of $1 million. The proceeds were due to go to Western Sahara’s national liberation movement, the Polisario Front.…

The death toll continued to rise as PN went to press. Israeli snipers killed over 100 unarmed Palestinians in six weeks of demonstrations at the fence separating Gaza from Israel.

During the ‘Great March of Return’, Israeli forces injured more than 5,000 protesters, over 3,000 of them with live…

On 9 April, the People's Weapons Inspectors visited a Roxel factory which builds propulsion systems for missiles. Their aim was to carry out a 'people's weapons inspection', to find out whether parts built at this factory (near Kidderminster in Worcestershire) might be used by the Saudi military in the war in Yemen.

The inspectors believed that the factory was manufacturing components for Brimstone missiles that are due to be exported to Saudi…

Peace News held the second of our Weaving Our Own Web dayschools, in January 2018, for campaigners who want to learn more about online tools that can help them with their groups, and help them win their campaigns. Here are some resources from the day:

Wordpress for campaigns by Kirk Jackson

Social media presentations are available at …

Protests are being prepared for a visit to the UK by Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman between 7 – 9 March. Human rights campaigners are pressing for him to be arrested for war crimes.

‘The crown prince is a figurehead for a regime with one of the worst human rights records in the world. He has overseen…

The two-week COP23 climate talks in Bonn, Germany, in November were met with a 25,000-strong march; a 4,500-strong mine invasion (above right); the occupation of a nearby coal-fired power station; a banner-hang on a coal ship in Bonn itself;…

On 6 October, the Norwegian Nobel committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2017 to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Executive director Beatrice Fihn laughed in disbelief when the committee rang to inform her.

ICAN was awarded the prize for drawing attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons, and for its work on a nuclear…

New York, 7 July 2017: Negotiations of a new international treaty that bans nuclear weapons concluded at the United Nations today as the treaty was formally adopted by states. The United Kingdom, alongside other nuclear-armed states, has boycotted the negotiations despite government claims to support multilateral disarmament and a world without nuclear weapons.

'States that are serious about eliminating nuclear weapons have joined the United Nations treaty negotiations to ban nuclear…

The Movement for the Abolition of War (MAW), organiser of the series of Peace History Conferences, has a strong and creative relationship with the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London. This works because, on MAW’s side, there is an attitude not of dogmatic pacifism but of reasoned opposition to…

Lots of high-profile direct action cases have court dates coming up.

DSEI appeal

On 13 June, the high court in London will review the acquittal of eight anti-arms fair activists – Isa Al-Aali (Bahrain), Bram Vranken (Belgium), Luis Tinoco Torrejon (Peru), and Lisa Butler, Angela Ditchfield, Thomas Franklin, Susannah Mengesha (UK) – by Stratford magistrates court in April 2016.
The high court’s decision is likely to affect peace activists’ ability to use the legal defence…