North America

Bradley Manning, 22-year-old US soldier posted to Iraq in the military intelligence service, shall be tried – and, of course, sentenced- by a war council that the high command of his own Army will preside over. His crime is to have spread true but secret information on the US wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Police in Toronto arrested over six hundred protesters taking part in demonstrations against the G20 global economic summit. Many of the arrests occurred on Sunday when police raided a University of Toronto building housing protesters. Amnesty International has called for an independent probe into the police crackdown.

“I have a dream”. Ask anyone where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. first proclaimed those words, and the response will most likely be at the March on Washington in August 1963. But in fact, he delivered them two months earlier, on June 23, in Detroit, leading a march down Woodward Avenue.
King said: “I have a dream that one day, …

Alice Slater from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation reacts to 38 million dollars of US funding for new nuclear research projects. “It’s just so 20th century!… It’s time to invest in a clean energy future that will create millions of jobs and enable the US to earn an honest dollar by developing desirable new technology to offer to the world.”

The NPT conference has come to an end after 4 weeks of intense debate and horse-trading in New York with little progress on disarmament. The Conference calls on Ban Ki-Moon to convene a conference to work on a nuclear weapon free zone in the Middle East. NGOs are disappointed by lack of progress on a convention to ban weapons and by the proliferation of nuclear energy.

The Non-proliferation Treaty Review Conference is in its fourth and final week. Parallel to the official meetings with delegates of states parties to the NPT, active members of NGOs are in New York to represent the interests of civil society. Diane Perlman of Psychologists for Social Responsibility puts the case for a change of consciousness regarding nuclear power.

In this article renewable energy activist, Alice Slater, points out the dangers of the world advancing in the proliferation of nuclear energy and calls on all countries to join the International Renewable Energy Agency as a way to make redundant article IV of the Non-proliferation Treaty “inalienable right” to nuclear energy.

The tired old mantra of arms control and incremental steps is still dominating discussions at the NPT Review Conference, despite the growing push for a Nuclear Weapons Convention. Calls by Nuclear Weapons States, for the most part, lack any sense of real urgency — even though it is clear that meaningful action for abolition is needed now, and cannot continue to be postponed.

UN Secretary-General remarks to the Inter-Parliamentary Union and Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament:
“Ten years ago, the NPT Review Conference described the total elimination of nuclear arsenals as “the only guarantee against the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons”. Ten years on, I urge you to help to make disarmament a truly global cause”.

Non-governmental organizations at the NPT Abolition Caucus express dismay at the unashamed pushing of a nuclear energy agenda at the NPT conference. They condemn the false advertising of the benefits of nuclear energy by the IAEA and the P5. “985,000 people died of cancer caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe between 1986 and 2004.”