PN Staff

PN Staff

PN staff

1 June 2023News

Japanese bank withdraws from pipeline

A major Japanese bank, the Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC), has been forced to withdraw from financing the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP). This has been claimed as a win by the #StopEACOP coalition of over 260 civil society organisations.

The 900-mile-long heated pipeline, a project of French oil company Total and Chinese oil company CNOOC, threatens to displace thousands of families and farmers from their land and rip through numerous sensitive biodiversity…

2 April 2023News

Over £560,000 given to Black-led organisations, so far

On 6 March, Black Lives Matter UK (BLMUK) announced more of what it’s done with the £1.2mn that it raised in 2020, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in the US.

BLMUK made an initial distribution of £170,000 in February 2021 to 13 grassroots groups such as the United Families and Friends Campaign. UFFC is a coalition of those affected by deaths in police, prison and psychiatric custody.

A basic commitment was to distribute at least half of the…

2 April 2023News

‘Staggering escalation of the government’s clampdown on protest’ looks set to become law

As PN went to press, the Public Order bill was on its way to becoming law.

While the House of Lords did make some changes to this repressive legislation, the bill as a whole remains a ‘staggering escalation of the government’s clampdown on protest’.

That was the description given at the end of January in a joint parliamentary briefing from Amnesty International UK, Liberty, Big Brother Watch, Greenpeace, the Black Equity Organisation, Netpol (the Network for Police…

2 April 2023News

Call-out for photos and conversations

Does ‘national security’ have to be discussed in such a boring way, with long words that hardly anyone understands? What if everyone could take part in defining ‘security’ just by taking a photo to represent what safety means to them, and talking about it? Can creativity contribute to analysis?

Rethinking Security is running a ‘Visualising Security’ project as part of its Alternative Security Review (due out later this year). The aim is ‘to build a collection of images and stories…

2 April 2023News

Corbyn and CND plant memorial to much-loved campaigner

On 4 March, CND chair Kate Hudson (centre) and Islington MP Jeremy Corbyn (right) planted a tree in memory of the late, great Bruce Kent, just north of the running track in his beloved Finsbury Park, North London, near his home.

1 April 2023News

Proposal for new disarmament treaty

In mid-March, two US researchers put forward a proposal for a new nuclear disarmament treaty, ‘All START’, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. This would include all five nuclear weapon states recognised in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: Britain, China and France as well as Russia and the US.

Another new move would be to make the treaty ‘of unlimited duration’ instead of time-limited.

Russia announced in February that it would be suspending its participation in New…

1 February 2023Feature

Call for groups to join 100,000-strong protest, beginning 21 April

On 1 January, the direct action climate group Extinction Rebellion (XR) UK announced that it was making a ‘controversial’ New Year’s resolution to ‘temporarily shift away from public disruption as a primary tactic’. The move seems to have been partly motivated by a fear of the new public order legislation the government has brought in to suppress disruptive direct action.

The XR statement, headed ‘We Quit’, ended by promoting ‘The Big One’, a massive multi-day action that XR plans to…

1 February 2023News

No outrage over killing of 25 people in an illegal war

Afghanistan was a major topic of media debate in January, but not because of the humanitarian catastrophe there, or the way that the West has contributed to the economic crisis, including by ‘freezing’ (stealing) Afghanistan’s foreign reserves.

Right-wing newspapers were upset that the younger son of the new king of the UK had ‘boasted’ in his new book, Spare, of killing 25 suspected Afghan insurgents during his tour of duty in Afghanistan as an Apache helicopter pilot.

1 February 2023News

Ziegler precedent leads to not-guilty verdict in trial of Just Stop Oil campaigners

One of last year’s most talked-about British direct actions ended with Hannah Hunt (23) and Eben Lazarus (22) walking free from court, with £850 fines. The two Just Stop oil supporters had glued a nightmare version of Constable’s The Hay Wain over the painting itself in the National Gallery on 4 July – and glued their own hands to the frame of the painting (PN 2661).

They were found ‘guilty’ of aggravated trespass and criminal damage at Westminster magistrates court…

1 February 2023News

Swarm of AI-controlled drones tested on Salisbury Plain in December 

Drone Wars UK warned in January that two recent trials of AI-controlled military drones showed the urgent need for international controls over the development and use of ‘killer robots’.

In January, the British ministry of defence revealed that it had carried out trials on Salisbury Plain in December of a ‘swarm’ of Ghost drones controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) which was updated during the drone’s flight.

In the US, drone manufacturer General Atomics also carried out…

1 February 2023News

Release of assets frozen by US / UK crucial to averting further catastrophe

‘The unanimous view of the UN, the Red Cross, Red Crescent, the nongovernmental organisations, our own 1,500 aid workers, who are now being paralysed, is that the crisis is just catastrophic. It’s a population in freefall, really. Again, it’s minus-15 Celsius, but people are out in the open. People have now been hungry for months.

‘Famine is coming and will engulf six million, is the estimation. Water and sanitation is lacking for people. Epidemic disease is threatening. It couldn’t…

1 February 2023News

11 Feb 'Night Carnival' to take place in wake of 'Belmarsh Tribunal'

People around the world continue to campaign against the extradition of Julian Assange to the US , where he faces a 175-year sentence for publishing truthful information in the public interest – US government documents revealing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

On 20 January, campaigners in the US held ‘The Belmarsh Tribunal’, an online event bringing together a range of expert witnesses – from constitutional lawyers to acclaimed journalists and human rights defenders – to…

1 February 2023News

Military used diagnoses to 'get rid of the problem'

On 14 January, the Daily Telegraph published its latest investigation into sexual assault in the British army.

Danielle Sheridan, the paper’s defence editor, reported: ‘Hundreds of female members of the Armed Forces who accused their colleagues of rape were “misdiagnosed” with having a personality disorder.’

The women were medically discharged after seeking help for sexual assault and being ‘written off’ with emotionally unstable personality disorder.

Sheridan…

1 February 2023News

Ukrainian conscientious objector jailed

Ukrainian conscientious objector Vitaliy Alexeienko had his appeal rejected on 16 January and is believed to have been imprisoned shortly afterwards by order of an appeal court in Ivano-Frankivsk in Western Ukraine. Ukraine has suspended the right of conscientious objection.

Vitaliy, 46, had told the authorities last June that he refused to be conscripted into the Ukrainian army because of his pacifist religious beliefs.

He said that he was willing to take up alternative…

1 February 2023News

Zelenskyy's call for a Global Peace Summit is about supporting Ukraine’s war effort, not negotiating an end to the war

The mainstream media continues to suppress unwelcome but crucial facts about Ukraine’s recent peace positions, and to distort Russia’s current position.

It goes without saying that the Russian invasion a year ago was a criminal act and that Russia has committed and continues to commit a host of war crimes. However, it does not help us to find a way out of this disaster if we distort the facts.

Lawrence Freedman is perhaps the most respected foreign policy academic in Britain.…