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On 19 November, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar, which has become an international cause célèbre, ‘will be demolished very soon’. The removal of the village would enable the Israeli government to cut the occupied West Bank in two, making a Palestinian state impossible.

The Israeli security cabinet had delayed the demolition by ‘several weeks’ on 21 October to provide time for negotiations for an agreed-upon evacuation of the…

As PN went to press, the trial was continuing at Chelmsford crown court of the Stansted 15, activists who face years in prison for using lock-ons to ground a charter flight for 10 hours. The 15 prevented the deportation of 60 undocumented immigrants to West Africa on 28 March 2017.

The defence argue that their action was to prevent the human rights abuses that deportation charter flights involve.

The first defendant to give evidence, Benjamin Smoke, described his…

The campaign against two new nuclear reactors at Wylfa on the Isle of Anglesey is gathering force on several fronts. In the immediate vicinity of the site, local people are beginning to appreciate the vast scale of the development (about the size of Holyhead, the biggest town on Anglesey), the extent of environmental damage involved, the social and cultural impact of the invasion. They’re also beginning to realise that few of the promised flood of jobs will actually be local.

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On 24 October, Aberystwyth peace activist Mary Millington travelled to Shrewsbury with messages for Theresa May, Jeremy Hunt and other MPs, writes Lotte Reimer. The locally-collected letters and petitions demanded that Britain sign up to the UN’s Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Having picked up more signatures at stations along the way, handed over by local activists, Mary (pictured with her placard at Shrewsbury railway station) got on the ‘…

Extremely late in the day, in mid-November, Britain finally put forward a draft UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in and around the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah, and setting out a possible peace process. This was over two weeks after the US started calling for a ceasefire in Yemen.

As Labour shadow foreign…

‘We are proud to have broken the power of the military authority…. It matters not whether we were in the Non-Combatant Corps refusing to bear arms, whether we took alternative service, whether we were in workcamps as part of the Home Office Scheme, or whether we were absolutist and remained in prison – all of us shattered the infallibility of militarism.’

100 years after a sick and emaciated Clifford Allen…

Climate activist group Ende Gelände described its occupation in late October as the ‘largest action of civil disobedience for climate justice that Germany has ever seen’.

On 27 October, 6,500 people took part in the action at Tagebau Hambach, a large opencast coalmine near Cologne, Germany, where highly-polluting brown coal (lignite) is extracted by German…

On 17 October, three anti-fracking protesters were released after spending three weeks in Preston prison. Roscoe Blevins, 26, and Richard Roberts, 36, had been sentenced to 16 months in prison; Richard Loizou, 31, had been given 15 months inside.

The court of appeal replaced the prison sentences with two-year conditional discharges (no punishment unless you commit another offence within two years, in which case you will be sentenced for both crimes).

Lord chief justice…

On 6 October, a plaque was put up at 3 Blackstock Road, North London, to honour the designer of the peace symbol, Gerald Holtom. It was there, in the PN office, in February 1958, that Gerald first presented sketches for the symbol to PN editor Hugh Brock and other organisers of the Direct Action Committee. They accepted the design as the theme for the first Aldermaston march for nuclear disarmament.
 

Local residents and campaigners were jubilant on 20 September when the Planning Inspectorate upheld Caerphilly county borough council’s 2015 ruling and rejected developer Miller Argent’s appeal for an opencast coal mine at Nant Llesg.

The United Valleys Action Group (UVAG), local activists and residents worked with Friends of the Earth (FOE) to oppose the opencast mine. Haf Elgar, director of FOE Cymru, said it was a ‘historic victory’ for people power.

UVAG’s Alyson…

On 5 August, Italian Ploughshares activist Turi Vaccaro was arrested near Niscemi in southern Sicily, and then imprisoned in the capital, Palermo. The barefoot campaigner will serve an 11-month, 27-day sentence in a maximum-security prison for nonviolent direct action against the MUOS military satellite communication system. MUOS is used to direct US drones, among other ‘mobile users’.

Italian special police attempted to arrested Turi at this summer’s annual ‘No MUOS’ protest camp…

For a few hours on 22 September, the gate to Faslane, the Clyde estuary home of the UK’s Trident submarines, became a ‘hostile environment’ for nuclear weapons.

In putting together the ‘Nae Nukes, Anywhere’ event, Scottish CND planned something more than a demo or a protest. The vision was for a celebration of transnational…

The Friendship Inn in Borth, near Aberystwyth, was packed to the rafters on 8 September as people gathered for the potentially solemn purpose of raising funds in support of ‘Freedom from Torture’. This organisation dreams of a world free from torture but, until such time, it supports survivors of torture in rebuilding their lives and it works to bring perpetrators to account.

The vision for the…

This summer, Abdullah, 13, Abdulaziz, 12, and Maria, 5, fled from Saudi airstrikes on their neighbourhood in the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah. Their mother and father, who didn’t wish to publish their own names, are destitute and searching for work in Sana’a, 90 miles from the coast. Photo: Becky Bakr Abdulla/Norwegian Relief Council.

‘This war risks killing an entire generation of Yemen’s children’, said Carolyn Miles, the president of Save the Children, on 18 September. As she spoke,…

From 18–24 August, Time to Cycle organised a bike ride from London to the Code Rood week-long climate action camp in Groningen in the Netherlands. Over 700 people from Code Rood held a 48-hour sit-down blockade of Europe’s largest gas field in Farmsum, near Groningen, starting on 28 August.

Our cycling trip, that was to become a beautiful shared experience…

Following a massive wave of civil disobedience in May–June which led to 2,500 arrests (see PN 2620–2621), the new Poor People’s Campaign in the US has committed to a voter registration campaign in over 40 states.

Without endorsing particular candidates, the aim is to make poor people a significant force in the mid-term elections on 6 November. That’s when all members of the house of representatives, a third of senators, most governors and many local officials across the US will be…

In the largest survey to date of the potential of rising renewable energy supplies, a new report from the Centre for Alternative Technology shows that clean energy can meet our electricity needs all year round at all times of the day.

Launched in the run up to the COP24 climate summit in Poland in December, the report, Raising Ambition: Zero Carbon Scenarios from Across the Globe, maps over 130 scenarios designed to meet the targets of the Paris climate accord at global, regional…

The Great March of Return demonstrations at the Gaza-Israel border fence have not only continued every Friday since March, they are escalating. Protests now happen on other days of the week as well, after ceasefire talks between the Hamas government in Gaza and the Israeli government broke down.

During these demos, Israeli forces have killed over 130 unarmed Palestinians, including 29 children and three medics. Around 20,000 Gazans have been injured, nearly 5,000 by live…

Bank Holiday Monday, 27 August, was the 35th anniversary of the day a group of women set off from Cardiff to walk to Greenham Common to protest against the US cruise missile base there.

Women and their now-adult children who had been on the original march gathered with others in Cardiff at Alexandra Gardens to commemorate the march. There were speeches and Heather Jones and Côr Cochion sang songs…

In early August, the annual fast in remembrance of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings was held in seven countries.

In London, four people fasted behind the ministry of defence in Whitehall. They also held a demo outside Downing Street urging the UK to sign the UN global ban on nuclear weapons.

Long-time Scottish peace activists Janet Fenton and Brian Quail fasted in Edinburgh and Glasgow. In…