PN-related

PN-related

PN-related

31 May 2012Letter

Sergeant Musgrave continues to dance

John Arden well deserved Michael Randle’s excellent obituary (PN 2544). I have a particularly soft spot for JA as I inherited his Personal Comment column for PN when he left for Ireland in the early ’70s.

His comments on his difficulties with absolute pacifism are illuminated in his challenging and contrary play Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959). I’ve seen several performances and if the director and actors are not sympathetic to its politics and don’t…

1 March 2012Letter

Love the new design! It looks great!

1 March 2012Letter

Excellent new Peace News. I like bold use of colour but masthead should be more prominent. Good listings page but should be more prominent. Good pages on Scotland and Wales. More green action news please.

1 March 2012Letter

New look PN is beautiful!

1 March 2012Letter

I very much like the new design, by the way. Very smart.

1 March 2012Letter

As long-time subscribers to PN, we’re sending you our feedback on how much we like the new layout. It has more immediacy, being similar in some aspects to PN’s earlier ‘newspaper’ layout – but more spaced out than I remember the earlier PN and having colour right through the paper brings attention to the articles.

It’s easier to read the longer articles when they’re set out like this. We particularly liked the David Polden and Medea Benjamin articles.

1 March 2012Comment

PN had made brief mention of the death of King George VI, saying – amongst other things – “Peace News records its deep sympathy with the Royal Family so suddenly bereaved...”. The item generated a lot of correspondence on subsequent letters pages.

Peter Green: We expect this dope from the capitalist press, but not from a paper which is “international” and “pacifist”. It does not help the cause of pacifism or internationalism to salute the head of a military and imperialist state.

Ethel Mannin: The king was probably... a good father and husband, and, according to his lights, what is commonly called “decent”. However, those lights and that decency are not our pacifist conception of goodness... The most astonishing assertion in…

1 March 2012Letter

Good luck and thanks for PN. It’s very heartening because it’s good to hear the truth re all global happenings!

24 January 2012Comment

The new PN design: on paper and on-line.

Past issues of Peace News, stretching back over its 75 years of publication. The old masthead was used for a glossy magazine (top left), a less glossy magazine (bottom left) and the current newspaper format (bottom center). PHOTO: Erica Smith

A new design!

We’re beginning 2012 with a new look to Peace News. We hope you like it. The changes we are making (they will continue over the next couple of issues) are the product of a lot of…

24 January 2012Letter

I was extremely saddened to hear of the death of John Hyatt. We first met when John (then living in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, I think) was a teenager in the 1960s on the Coast to Coast Peace March from Hull to Liverpool. Later we got to know each other when we were both working at Housmans – where I worked from 1969-1982 – John also working down the road at the PPU and upstairs at both Peace News and WRI as well – at different times.

He was a lovely guy and the easiest person to work…

24 January 2012News

PN helps get over £2,000 worth of aid to internally displaced Afghans

January is always a desperate time of year for the occupants of the Chamne Babak refugee camp in Kabul. Temperatures at night drop to well below freezing and the little work that the men in the camp can find dries up as the snow begins to fall. This year however some relief was delivered thanks to the readers of Peace News and members of the National Union of Journalists at the Financial Times.

Well over £2,000 was raised (over £1,700 through Peace News) and on 3 January it was delivered…

24 January 2012Comment

A look-back at PN's (in)famous national gatherings.

National gatherings of PN readers have taken place in many guises over the years - for much of the 1970s the regular events (sometimes every few months) were called “potlatches”. (“A potlatch is a gift-giving festival and primary economic system practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and United States” – Wikipedia.) Here, Dave Cunliffe, a poet and long-time friend of Peace News from Blackburn, reports on a winter meeting:

Friday night 9pm, tomatoes…

1 December 2011Comment

Churches, schools and peace

Fasting not feasting

[Activists over a range of issues can find themselves less than welcome at famous churches.]

RI Jeffrey reports: "Pacifism is a political attitude and it is not our job to support it." Thus said the Dean of York in refusing his permission for the York Pacifist Group to hold a fasting vigil inside York Minster, from 7pm on Christmas Eve until midnight on Christmas Day, as a protest against war and the use of violence.

Not to worry - and…

1 October 2011Comment

So, it’s finally here. The Rebellious Media Conference (RMC, née the Radical Media Conference) is finally taking place, nearly two years after the first brainstorming in the Peace News office about how to mark our 75th anniversary.

The very first version of the event was PN promotions worker Gabriel Carlyle’s suggestion that we could call together 40-50 people connected to or sympathetic with Media Lens, to try to improve how we all put pressure on the mainstream media. (Given this origin, we very much regret that Media Lens were not able to make the dates to be part of the RMC.) The scale of the event ballooned as we quickly realised that we would really like a radical media conference to do three things that we didn’…

1 October 2011Letter

I appreciated the variety and breadth of the last issue including up to the minute items on Afghanistan and the UK riots. As always PN surprises, this time with the colour photos of Guy Smallman and art of Lorna Vahey.