WISE Up for Bradley Manning is a grassroots network in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England (WISE) taking action for the young US military intelligence analyst who has been held by the US government for two years without trial.
Accused of blowing the whistle on US war crimes and revealing other truths the US would have preferred to keep buried, Bradley Manning has been tortured and denied his constitutional rights.
When US president Barack Obama, commander-in-chief of the…
Following showings in Cardiff and Swansea, the internationally-acclaimed film Robert Mugabe... What Happened? was screened at Aberystwyth Arts Centre on
20 May.
Prior to the film, Côr Gobaith, the local activist choir, sang a selection of African freedom songs for the gathering audience.
The film is complex and compelling, interweaving the story of Zimbabwe’s first 30 years with the personal journey of Robert Mugabe.
From much-admired, bright young Turk of the…
On 21 April, the first peace fair to be held in Tregaron in recent times celebrated the bicentenary of the birth of peace campaigner Henry Richard MP, whose statue stands in the town square.
Bruce Kent, the well-known CND campaigner, spoke about the importance of having peace movements all over the world and suggested that the existence of the European Union makes another war in Europe an impossibility.
Noted Welsh poet Mererid Hopwood reminded us that in Wales we host ‘the…
‘Hold this a moment, while I staple these.’ Ninety minutes and nearly a mile later, I was still holding aloft the mid-section of the giant green dinosaur, and being used as cover by some masked youths making a grab for some plastic barriers. ‘If the police move in to arrest people, I’m off,’ the hind legs told me.
Several hundred people – variously dressed as Robin Hood and giant flowers – had met outside the Grange Hotel near St Paul’s cathedral, venue of the UK Energy Summit, for…
Faslane Peace Campers are happy to announce that the 30 Days of Action, from 9 June to 9 July, will be filled with anti-nuclear shenanigans of the highest order.
Of the things we can disclose: there will be a CND peace picnic on 17 June; a peace march from Glasgow to Faslane from 21-23 of June; and on 1-2 July there will be a two-day Rise Up musical gathering – everyone is welcome and…
The 14 May written agreement, brokered by Egypt, commits the Israeli authorities to: re-starting visits from immediate family; ending ‘long-term’ solitary confinement; creating a prisoner liaison committee; and creating a new framework for Palestinians in ‘administrative detention’.
These 308 prisoners, held without charge or trial, will not be put under new detention orders when their current period of detention ends – unless the secret files on which their detention was based…
Bill Hetheringon: The London ceremony was held on ICO Day itself, at the CO commemorative stone in Tavistock Square near Euston. There was an Amnesty International update on the long-standing harsh treatment of COs in Eritrea and South Korea, and the laying of white flowers commemorating 80 named objectors from as many countries around world over the past century.
The event ended with singing by the Raised Voices choir.
Janet King: In Birmingham, around 20 people came to the…
We didn’t think we’d get in. The UKTI DSO Symposium is the biggest event of the year for Britain’s arms exporters – so you’d think they’d have better security.
(UK Trade & Investment or UKTI is the government department that promotes all of Britain’s exports, and DSO is the part of UKTI that promotes arms sales. Arms make up only 1.2% of UK exports, but more…
On 15 May, lawyers from Leigh Day & Co and Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) – the latter acting on behalf of well-known peace activist Maya Evans – won the right to a further judicial review of the transfer of prisoners from British to Afghan forces.
As a consequence, the UK announced that all British transfers to the Afghan authorities in Kabul, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah would be stopped – and the court made clear that it expected this moratorium to be observed until the review has…
These are the findings of a new report, Don’t Bank on the Bomb, the first to survey global investments in nuclear weapons producers. More than 300 financial institutions, including RBS, fund companies that build nuclear warheads or the missiles, bombers and submarines used to deliver them.
Co-author Tim Wright, from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which conducted the research, said: ‘RBS…
Their destination was the West Bank in occupied Palestine, where they planned to take part in a cultural project including the building of a school and repairing wells damaged by settlers.
Travellers to the occupied territories are forced to lie in order to pass through Israel, otherwise they are subjected to interrogation, detention and deportation. The ‘Welcome to Palestine’ mass fly-in was endorsed by Desmond Tutu…
Solidarity protest at Red Road flats on 12 April. photo: Duncan Brown
The asylum seekers have had their claims for asylum refused even though most of their countries are too dangerous to return to. Their home countries include Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia and Zimbabwe.
Some people have received letters saying the locks on their doors would be changed in the next two weeks.
…
A ‘Peace Plinth’ that has been the centrepiece of Peace Strike’s round-the-clock vigil in Parliament Square for over two years has been transported to the US. It will form part of the BritWeek T4C Artists Competition in Los Angeles. Since its construction at the Kew Eco Village in November 2009, the six-foot-high plinth has been used to display work by a range of artists, including Banksy and Johan Andersson. A second plinth remains in Parliament Square, where it is…
On 18 April, US federal authorities seized a server in New York belonging to Riseup, a radical internet service provider.
Over 300 email accounts, between 50-80 email lists, and several websites were taken off the internet by the FBI action.
Women’s resistance to Trident nuclear weapons continues at Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp (AWPC). All women are welcome to join us every second weekend of every month (see p16 ‘Regular events’). Fun, good food, great company! Not reliant on the sun! photo: Kay Tabernacle
On 1 April, activists from Trident Ploughshares and Faslane Peace Camp joined over 800 others (from over 10 European countries) protesting outside NATO’s Brussels headquarters. The demonstration was against NATO’s wars in Afghanistan and Libya, and its possession of nuclear weapons.
The demonstration was organised by the Belgian group, Action for Peace, as part of the run-up to a NATO summit in Chicago on 20-21…
Rare image of symposium co-organiser Andrew Rigby, 10 April. photo: Milan Rai
Over 50 activists and peace researchers from around the world assembled at Coventry University’s Technopark in mid-April for a highly-successful ‘International Symposium on Nonviolent Movements and the Barrier of Fear’.
Describing the result as ‘a Bradford Spring’ moment, ‘a kind of uprising, a peaceful democratic uprising of especially young people’, Galloway pointed out that: ‘No party to the left of Labour has ever taken a Labour seat in a period when Labour has been in opposition.’
Guardian political editor Patrick Wintour cited Galloway’s allegedly ‘fundamentalist’ call for an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan and his…
Two recent agreements between the US and Afghan governments suggest that US/UK ‘withdrawal’ (actually, thousands of US troops will remain and ‘continue to participate in combat missions’, according to White House spokesperson Jay Carney) will be accompanied by increased use of Afghan proxies to torture, imprison and assassinate
The first, signed 9 March, transferred the ‘management’ of the US prison complex at…
Former navy medic and conscientious objector Michael Lyons – who spent seven months in prison for his opposition to the war in Afghanistan (see PN 2538) – addresses the launch of Veterans for Peace UK on 9 April. Other speakers included Iraq war vets Matthew Horne and Danny Martin, D-Day veteran Jim Radford, Catholic Worker Scott Albrecht (who served in the US air force during the cold war) and Vietnam war resister Gerry Condon. The new group aims to resist war through nonviolent…
