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Climate protesters in England and Wales lose criminal damage defence

The Guardian | Protest -

Appeal court says defendants’ ‘beliefs and motivation’ do not constitute lawful excuse for damaging property

One of the last defences for climate protesters who commit criminal damage has been in effect removed by the court of appeal. The court said the “beliefs and motivation” of a defendant do not constitute lawful excuse for causing damage to a property.

The defence that a person honestly believes the owner of a property would have consented had they known the full circumstances of climate change has been used successfully over the last year by protesters.

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Suffragettes attacked Buckingham Palace. Now Camilla is paying tribute to them – and so should we | Diane Atkinson

The Guardian | Protest -

The brave, risky campaign for women’s right to vote has inspired activists for more than 100 years. Here’s what we can learn from them

I was both shocked and delighted when I read that at the Women of the World festival earlier this month, Queen Camilla held up two stones that had been hurled at the windows of Buckingham Palace in May 1914. The stones had been thrown by two women, and each carried a message on which the justification for their action was written. One of these messages was “Constitutional methods being ignored drive us to window smashing”; another was: “If a constitutional deputation is refused, we must present a stone message.”

The stones broke through the glass and probably landed on the carpet inside the palace. Rather than throwing them away, as we might have expected, King George V and Queen Mary instead seem to have chosen to keep at least two of the stones, perhaps as souvenirs or mementoes, which is how Camilla came to share them with us when she paid tribute to the women behind the protest. It was a brave move that ran the risk of criticism from conservatives and misogynists. Camilla spoke of the suffragettes’ ambition to “make this world a better place for women”. I don’t remember any other royal endorsing the actions of the women’s movement, especially one as provocative, controversial and risky as the Women’s Social and Political Union, which led the campaign for suffrage.

Diane Atkinson is a historian and the author of Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes

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Rule of law declining across EU, report warns

The Guardian | Protest -

Civil liberties network says in states where far-right parties influence power, rule-of-law deterioration risks becoming systemic

The rule of law is declining across the EU as governments continue to weaken legal and democratic checks and balances, a leading civil liberties network has said, highlighting in particular a sharp rise in restrictions on the right to protest.

Berlin-based Liberties said in its annual report, compiled with 37 rights groups in 19 countries, that in older democracies with mainstream parties in government, such as France, Germany and Belgium, challenges to the rule of law remained sporadic.

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Russians urged to disrupt final day of Vladimir Putin’s presidential election

The Guardian | Protest -

Voters told to swamp polling stations all at once and spoil ballots, after two days of dye attacks, fires and Ukrainian cross-border strikes

Critics of Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin regime have called for massive protests at Russian polling stations on Sunday, the final day of a presidential election that is guaranteed to cement his hardline rule.

The three-day vote has already been hit by Ukrainian bombardments and a series of incursions into Russian territory by anti-Putin sabotage groups. Early on Sunday, a drone attack caused a fire at a refinery at Slavyansk in the Krasnodar region of southern Russia, where officials said one person died of a heart attack, while two people died after drone strikes in the Russian city of Belgorod on Saturday, according to officials.

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Climate activists across Europe block access to North Sea oil infrastructure

The Guardian | Protest -

Blockades at facilities in Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, with protests in Scotland and action expected in Denmark

Climate activists in four countries are blocking access to North Sea oil infrastructure as part of a coordinated pan-European civil disobedience protest.

Blockades have been taking place at oil and gas terminals, refineries and ports in Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, in protest at the continued exploitation of North Sea fossil fuel deposits.

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Aaron Bushnell opposed ‘all state-sanctioned violence’ — not just the war in Gaza

Waging Nonviolence -

This article Aaron Bushnell opposed ‘all state-sanctioned violence’ — not just the war in Gaza was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Levi Pierpont’s voice was steady, the day I called him to ask about his friend Aaron Bushnell. “He was the sweetest guy you’d ever meet.”

The 23-year-old Air Force veteran was talking about one of his military peers — whose name was suddenly everywhere. Four days earlier, on Feb. 25, Bushnell had set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., to protest U.S. support of Israel’s war on Gaza.

I’d reached out to Pierpont because he’d left the military last year as a conscientious objector, long before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that burst the blister of Israel’s long siege. As someone who has spent much of the last 20 years writing about such servicemembers, I wanted to know more about Pierpont’s journey, and his response to his friend’s far more visible and permanent act of conscience.

In the three weeks since that day, Bushnell’s name has been spoken often at the near-daily Gaza protests across the country — especially those organized by veterans of the U.S. military. Last week, artist-activists got his words on the New York City subway, replacing ads with his final statement on social media: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

Pierpont talked to me shortly before The Guardian published his op-ed: “Aaron Bushnell was my friend. May he never be forgotten.” When I talked to him it was still very fresh; his voice trembled a little as he described his journey, one he wishes Bushnell had shared more fully.

They met in May 2020 at Goodfellow Air Force Base, at the beginning of basic military training. Bushnell arrived almost too late to start training; Pierpont said he “stood up for me” when Pierpont felt harassed. Bushnell’s bonhomie was a salve, Pierpont told me, amid basic training’s stereotypically loud atmosphere. Both were moving beyond their restrictive Christian families — Pierpont’s in evangelical Michigan, Bushnell the secretive Community of Jesus in Orleans, Massachusetts. And both were going on to work with intelligence with high-level security clearances.

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“[W]henever people in basic training would talk about me or would talk about him, we would stick up for each other. And he always stuck up for me,” Pierpont told “Democracy Now!” on Feb. 28. They spoke and texted often, even after basic training ended and they pursued different divisions of Air Force Tech School, Bushnell for cybersecurity and Pierpont for Operations Intelligence. Pierpont later started to ask the questions that would ultimately lead him to seek discharge as a conscientious objector, just as Bushnell was exulting on social media, “Man, the Air Force does some cool-ass shit.”

Still, Bushnell’s own doubts about the institution would grow after he was a firm member of the 571st Cyber Division, with access to real-time intel about what the Air Force was up to. The two of them didn’t talk much at Tech School, but did once they were at their respective bases, Pierpont at Minot AFB in North Dakota and Bushnell staying in Texas at Lackland AFB.

By then, Pierpont had left Operations Intelligence behind. At Tech School, learning to develop “intelligence products” assembled with Microsoft PowerPoint, he was bemused by its focus on Russia and training products he called “Secret YouTube and secret Wikipedia.” Less amusing was a video in which his whole class watched the death of an enemy combatant. Pierpont found himself feeling bad for the guy’s family, even if he was one of the terrorists they were being trained to hate. When “a bunch of my classmates laughed at that video,” Pierpont realized he wasn’t one of them. He asked to change classifications, so he wouldn’t be so directly involved in violent “operations.”

At Minot, Pierpont was 2ROX1, a Maintenance Management Analyst — in charge of generating and monitoring data on the maintenance of Air Force planes and equipment. It wasn’t a stress-free gig, though; all that data was in service of weapons of war, like Minot’s 488,000-pound B-52 bombers. “It was very traumatic for me to think about those aircraft,” Pierpont told me. After nearly a year, he contacted the Center for Conscience and War, and began working on his application for conscientious objection, or CO. He told his friend Aaron about it all “and he was really supportive,” he said.

In June 2023, Bushnell said on Reddit that he agreed with Pierpont, noting that “Apparently it’s very doable to become a ‘conscientious objector’ on religious grounds even after voluntarily enlisting. It’s a bit of a process and it takes about a year, but there are organizations to help guide you through it and the success rate is very high.”

But in his case, Bushnell said, “I’m sticking it out to the end of my contract, as I didn’t realize what a huge mistake it was until I was more than halfway through, and I only have a year left at this point. However it is a regret I will carry the rest of my life.”

Pierpont, who now identifies as more of a Buddhist than a Christian, said he had told Bushnell that CO wasn’t only for religious resisters, but respected his commitment not to break his contract. Still, Bushnell told Pierpont that he “wanted to take a stand against all state-sanctioned violence.”

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The last time they saw one another was in January 2024 in Toledo, Ohio, after Bushnell moved to Akron for SkillBridge (a transition program for members about to separate). They talked about Pierpont’s CO discharge, which had been approved in July 2023; they did not talk about what happened two months later, the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. “We never talked about Gaza” he said. Pierpont felt it was due to his own “centrist” position on the conflict, since Bushnell was on Reddit describing Israel as a “settler-colonialist apartheid state.” Back then, said Pierpont, “the Gaza war felt complex to me … but that was before 30,000 were dead.” And in the meantime, Bushnell was learning more about what he considered U.S. complicity in those deaths.

Afghanistan veteran Jeremy Lyle Rubin, pointed out in The Nation that “The U.S. Air Force has played a significant part in the killing spree in Gaza, assisting with intelligence and targeting.” He added that the U.S. is contributing to “what the political scientist Robert Pape has called ‘one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history, [now sitting] comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.’”

Given Pierpont’s Buddhism, I asked him if he knew about the high-profile Buddhist CO, Aidan Delgado. He had not; neither did he know about Norman Morrison, who set himself on fire nearly 60 years ago, to protest the U.S. war against Vietnam.

I don’t mention Morrison in my book “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” a history that focuses on dissenting military personnel like Pierpont and Bushnell, drawn on those I spoke to daily in the 1990s as a staffer with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. Many of the latter were like Pierpont, describing how military service had triggered a moral crisis that made it impossible to stay in the military.

The book does describe the all-hands movement against the Vietnam War, which included many Quakers like Morrison, whose fiery death, on Nov. 2, 1965, came as the U.S. war against Vietnam was metastasizing. At his Baltimore Quaker meeting, Morrison and his wife Anne watched, worried and prayed as more than 100,000 servicemembers were shipped to Vietnam and TV screens showed the massive bombing of North Vietnam by American fighter planes.

Morrison’s revelation of “what I must do” was triggered, his wife wrote, by an account in Paris-Match of the incineration of families in the village of Can Tho. “I have seen the bodies of women and children blown to bits,” a French priest told the author, Yves Larteguy. “I have seen all my villages razed. By God, it’s not possible!” Morrison circled that sentence in the clipping of the article he mailed to Anne from the Pentagon, just before he poured kerosene on himself and lit the match in full view of then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Though it still took 10 years for that war to end, Morrison’s act helped catalyze the sustained anti-war movement that shaped how it ended.

As Colonel Ann Wright points out, the death of Morrison and others “mobilized the anti-war community,” with years of weekly vigils at the U.S. Capitol that ultimately persuaded members of Congress to stand up against the war, the first of whom was Rep. George Brown. “After the Quakers were arrested and jailed for reading the names of the war dead, Brown would continue to read the names, enjoying congressional immunity from arrest.”

Perhaps hoping to build similar momentum to end the war in Gaza, Veterans for Peace and About Face — the antimilitarist group formerly known as Iraq Veterans Against the War — swung into action after Bushnell’s death. They expressed regret that he never connected with either organization. In Portland, some About Face members burned their uniforms, and the group has seen a surge of new members since those protests.

In addition to these actions, a separate “autonomous network of active duty service members across nearly all U.S. Armed Forces branches have released an open letter condemning Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” journalist Talia Jane tweeted on March 4.

Activists have still had complex responses to Bushnell’s “extreme act of protest,” wondering whether self-immolation damages the movements they’d hoped to propel — in addition to the damage to their families. Anne Morrison writes that she and her three children suppressed their pain and rage for years. Advocates for servicemembers and veterans raised the alarm that valorizing Bushnell’s death would do nothing to abate the already-high suicide rates in both populations.

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Nonetheless, Bushnell’s name has been invoked frequently by the “Vote Uncommitted” movement, an electoral pressure campaign that made a noticeable impact on the primaries in Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Georgia and Washington State.

Many of the vigils broadcast Bushnell’s last words, livestreamed on Twitch before he lit the match: “I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit to genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers — it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” Those words have been ubiquitous on the internet ever since.

So has the voice of Levi Pierpont, who is now volunteering for volunteering with the Center on Conscience and War and active with the divestment coalition at Michigan State University. “I want people to remember that his death is not in vain, that he died to spotlight this message,” he said in his interview with “Democracy Now!,” which has played at numerous vigils. “I don’t want anybody else to die this way. If he had asked me about this, I would have begged him not to.” But after seeing the way the media responded to Bushnell’s immolation, he added, “it’s hard not to feel like he was right, that this was exactly what was necessary to get people’s attention about the genocide that’s happening in Palestine. And so, I just — I want people to remember his message.”

This article Aaron Bushnell opposed ‘all state-sanctioned violence’ — not just the war in Gaza was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The Guardian view on Gove and extremism: this definition is a problem, not a solution | Editorial

The Guardian | Protest -

The government’s new approach is not a serious effort to tackle rising hatred and division

It is never a good sign when a minister needs to spend as long talking about what a new policy doesn’t do as what it does. Much of Michael Gove’s Thursday was occupied with stressing the limits of the new extremism definition. It will not be statutory, the communities secretary pointed out. It will “in no way threaten” free speech. It will not be used against environmental groups. It would not be used in response to an individual comment, he added, responding to the inevitable questions that arose because the crackdown coincided with the Guardian’s revelation that one of the Conservatives’ top donors, Frank Hester, said in 2019 that Diane Abbott “should be shot”.

What the new measure will do, said Mr Gove, is help the fight against extremism. It won’t. Had community cohesion and tackling hatred truly been a priority, a full public consultation and proper engagement with faith groups would have been the right way forward. Instead came what the Conservative peer Sayeeda Warsi described as a “divide and rule approach”.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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Edward Colston statue placed in quiet corner of Bristol museum

The Guardian | Protest -

As a result of consultation with local people, visitors must make deliberate choice to see toppled statue of slave trader

It is undoubtedly the most well-known artefact in Bristol’s waterside museum, but rather than being given a prominent position it has been tucked away in a modest case at the back of a first-floor gallery.

Finding the right setting in M Shed for the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, which was pulled from a plinth in the city and thrown into the harbour during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020, has been a delicate task.

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Michael Gove sets out new extremism definition for UK – video

The Guardian | Protest -

Michael Gove has set out a new definition of extremism, which he said would not affect gender critical campaigners, trans activists, or environment protest groups, but would help block funding to groups that ‘undermine democracy’.

In his opening statement, the levelling up secretary named organisations that he said were a cause for concern under the new definition. He named two he described as neo-Nazi: the British National Socialist Movement and Patriotic Alternative, and three that he associated with Islamism: Muslim Association of Britain, which he described as the British affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, Cage and Mend

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Hester’s remarks ‘horrific’ but not extremist, says Gove – UK politics live

The Guardian | Protest -

Communities secretary asked about Tory donor’s views says ‘an individual comment’ would not be enough to warrant scrutiny under new extremism rules

In his speech Keir Starmer has just confirmed that Labour would stop ticket touts buying up tickets for events and re-selling them at rip-off prices.

This is what Labour said about the plan in a news release this morning.

Reselling tickets for profit has already been banned in many countries, but under the Tories, fans have been let down.

Too often, genuine fans are missing out on getting tickets only to see those same tickets on secondary ticketing websites at far higher prices, making them unaffordable and putting them out of reach.

My first ever trip abroad was to Malta with the Croydon youth Philharmonic Orchestra. You will know that excitement you feel when you have an encounter with the arts that changes your life. Everyone in the room will know that the sense, I suppose, of being drawn into something that seems bigger than ourselves, of being truly moved by a piece of music, or painting, or a play …

Even now even now, listening to Beethoven or Brahms as I read the Sunday papers, takes the edge off some of the more uncomfortable stories.

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Solidarity and strategy: the forgotten lessons of truly effective protest

The Guardian | Protest -

Organising is a kind of alchemy: it turns alienation into connection, despair into dedication, and oppression into strength

‘Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers,” the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote in his 1777 essay Of the First Principles of Government. Centuries later, his observation still holds. Despite having numbers on our side, the vast majority of people continue to be dominated by a small subset of the population. Why?

Today, an oligarchic minority rules because they have extreme wealth. The 2022 World Inequality Report found that the richest 10% today take over 52% of all income, leaving the poorest half just 8.5%. The same year, the bottom half of US citizens, or more than 160 million people, held a mere 2% of the country’s total wealth. An upper class owns most of the land and capital, which allows them, in turn, to exert control over politics and pass on enormous fortunes to their offspring, effectively establishing a modern-day aristocracy.

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Ministers and officials to be banned from contact with groups labelled extremist

The Guardian | Protest -

New extremism definition to be published by Michael Gove is already being challenged by Muslim groups and experts

Ministers and civil servants will be banned from talking to or funding organisations that undermine “the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy”, under a new definition of extremism criticised by the government’s terror watchdog and Muslim community groups.

Michael Gove, the communities secretary, will tell MPs on Thursday that officials should consider whether a group maintains “public confidence in government” before working with it.

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Met to pay £10,000 to woman detained overnight after Sarah Everard vigil

The Guardian | Protest -

Jennifer Edmunds sued police, which have now settled after dropping charges relating to 2021 gathering on Clapham Common

The Metropolitan police has agreed to pay £10,000 in damages to a woman arrested at the Sarah Everard vigil in Clapham, her solicitors have said.

Jennifer Edmunds was detained overnight and charged with breaching Covid restrictions at the Clapham Common gathering on 13 March 2021, said Bhatt Murphy Solicitors.

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Extending extremism definition risks fuelling unlawful protest, warns Greenpeace UK

The Guardian | Protest -

Michael Gove told that cracking down on peaceful demonstrations creates space for less law-abiding protesters

Attempts by the government to capture more groups in its official definition of extremism risk fuelling the very extremism it claims to be trying to oppose, Greenpeace UK has said.

Ahead of an expected announcement by Michael Gove on Thursday, Areeba Hamid, joint executive director of the group, warned that shrinking the space for peaceful protesters in the UK would encourage others to go down the path of more destructive and unlawful forms of protest.

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Hair-plaiting for the Iranian resistance: Hoda Afshar’s best photograph

The Guardian | Protest -

‘This was inspired by a daily ritual in which female fighters in the mountains plait each other’s hair while chanting: “Woman, life, freedom.” It was a response to the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in Iran’

I was born in Tehran but have been living in Australia since 2007. This was taken as the uprisings in Iran were unfolding, following the 2022 death in custody of Mahsa Jina Amini, a Kurdish woman who was arrested by the country’s morality police, igniting protests. This image is part of a bigger series called In Turn, commissioned for A Curve Is a Broken Line, an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney last year. I wanted to use this platform to respond to what was happening, and what we saw in images emerging from Iran and circulating on social media. One motif was the act of plaiting hair, historically symbolising sisterhood, bonding and resistance. This tradition extends to the Kurdish women’s liberation movement, where as a daily ritual in the mountains, female fighters plait each other’s hair while chanting the slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” – “Woman, Life, Freedom”. Amini’s Kurdish heritage sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that followed her death, turning hair-plaiting into a symbol across Iran.

It was a female-led uprising. We were waking up every morning to news of deaths of protestors, but seeing the bravery of women – especially young ones – defying mandatory hijab laws gave us hope, as did men joining in the fight. But we were mourning too: people were dying for women’s rights. Despite the increasing strength of daily rallies, the regime’s violence escalated in tandem.

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Failure to insulate UK homes costing thousands of lives a year, says report

The Guardian | Protest -

Analysis finds 58 people have died due to cold homes every winter day since 2013 Tory pledge to ‘cut the green crap’

The government’s failure to insulate the UK’s cold and leaky homes is costing thousands of lives a year, according to analysis.

The report from Greenpeace reveals 58 people have died due to cold homes every day on average during the winter since David Cameron’s Conservative government decided to “cut the green crap” in 2013 – drastically slashing support for home insulation.

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Archbishops of Canterbury and York warn against new extremism definition

The Guardian | Protest -

Clerics say Michael Gove’s anti-extremism strategy risks targeting Muslims and may threaten freedom of speech and peaceful protest

The archbishops of Canterbury and York have joined the growing list of critics of the government’s new extremism definition, which they have warned risks “disproportionately targeting Muslim communities” and “driving us apart”.

Michael Gove will present his new counter-extremism strategy on Thursday, which he says will target organisations that undermine British democracy.

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Camilla lauds suffragette stones of ‘hope’ – and gets very own Barbie doll

The Guardian | Protest -

In speech as president of Women of the World festival, queen shows audience objects thrown at palace windows in 1914 protest

Two stones thrown at Buckingham Palace windows during a suffragette protest more than a century ago and saved for posterity represented “hope to the women who threw them”, Queen Camilla has told equality campaigners.

While some of the suffragette’s more destructive tactics could not be condoned today, Camilla said there was “sermon in the stones” that had cracked two window panes but were kept by the royal family.

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Swedish police forcibly remove Greta Thunberg from parliament entrance

The Guardian | Protest -

Thunberg and other activists dragged away from doorway they were obstructing in climate protest

Swedish police have forcibly removed Greta Thunberg and other climate activists after they blocked the entrance to the Swedish parliament for a second day.

Two officers lifted Thunberg and dragged her away before putting her down on the ground about 20 metres away from the door she had been obstructing.

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