Wales Newswire Archive

Video of the arrestes, content warning: Police brutality

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBoaeLb_ZZs

Gwybodaeth am brotest yng Nghaerdydd - Upcoming language rights demo in Cardiff

George Osborne’s budget cut to social housing rents of 1% a year for the next four years is set to throw organisations such as the Curo Housing Group into their biggest financial crisis.

The announcement caught Curo Housing by surprise. Just last year the government had committed to it increasing its rents based on CPI plus 1% a year for the next decade.

This year, an international gathering will be held in the UK, in Dudleston, Shropshire, on the Welsh/English border to resist the mega prison.

Police are harrassing, bullying and arresting Newport's homeless people even more than usual, telling them that they will be clearing them out of Newport. They are using the 1884 Vagrancy Act and imposing impossible bail conditions. This stinks of a clean-up ready for the opening of a new shopping centre in November. A mass sleepout has been organised so that we can help these exceptionally vulnerable people.

The Armed Forces Day 'family fun' extravaganza in Colwyn Bay's Parc Eirias went ahead on Saturday in intermittent drizzle and behind a prominent banner near the main gate stating what you'd have thought would be bleedin' obvious, but apparently to many punters wasn't: 'WAR IS NOT FAMILY ENTERTAINMENT'. As you'd expect of any attempt to disguise the brutal reality of war as fun and games, the event was at best conflicted and contradictory, at worst downright dishonest. With the stated aim of "recognising and honouring our armed forces and veterans" AFD is designed to leave no space open to question the legality or morality of the wars they've been off fighting in recent years, to ask whether warfare offers any real solutions for the problems we face, nor indeed to consider whether our various wars of aggression might conceivably be an aggravating factor in these problems.

In the end it was down to a handful of protesters to pitch up and create this space, right by the main entrance, and to break the illusion that everything in the military garden is rosy.

This event was held a week before official Armed Forces Day on 27 June. There's time to organise a presence at an AFD event in your area and it's well worth doing, however small. Even one person standing vigil at the gate can have a big impact.

All welcome except cops and journos.

Clutton Parish Council is urging developers who want to build in the village to work with it to find suitable sites that will benefit the local community following news that Curo Housing is pulling out of a scheme to build new homes.

These pictures were taken at the camp on Wednesday 3rd June.

Following investigations by the ICO B&NES Council claims it passed the paper copies of 13000 secure tenancy agreements to Curo Housing (formerly Somer Community Housing Trust) which Curo Housing denies ever having received.

On that basis the ICO states it cannot make a decision on which organisation is to blame for this loss as there is a lack of evidence to prove one way or the other ie: its the word of a senior B&NES Council Officer against the word of a senior Curo Housing manager !

TAILS AND TOR AND 12P

Five days of skill-sharing for grassroots ecological direct action - make links, share ideas, and get involved in the struggles against fracking, new roads and more

"There are many properties with asbestos that are not logged...I would hesitate to tell tenants about known asbestos..." (email from B&NES Council Housing Department to Curo Housing Chief Executive 2nd November 1999 5.00pm)

BarnCamp is a low-cost rural DIY skill-sharing event open to everyone, including UK activists, campaigners, people involved in social and community groups, and anybody else with an interest in technology and how to subvert it to put it to good use. This year it's running from 19th to 21st June.

On Saturday 25 April, over 50 people came together in Llangollen, Wales, on the centenary of the first Gallipoli landings to celebrate the very long life of Elisabeth (Lib) Rowlands-Hughes, born at the end of WWI into a family missing most of its young men.

Lib firmly believed that the lesson of WWI, a war which claimed the lives of four of her uncles, should be NEVER AGAIN. As an early member of the Peace Pledge Union, Lib made the following vow:

I renounce war, and am therefore determined not to support any kind of war. I am also determined to work for the removal of all causes of war

and this is what she did for the rest of her life.

Saturday 25 April is Anzac Day, and on this centenary of the first Gallipoli landings special commemorations are planned in Australia, New Zealand and in London including government sponsored events designed to bolster support for today's wars rather than mourn the terrible losses in WWI and learn the obvious lessons.

Here in Wales, we have chosen this day to celebrate the life of the great peace campaigner Elisabeth (Lib) Rowlands-Hughes, born right at the end of WWI, who lost an uncle at Gallipoli and three more in WWI: near Gaza and in France: uncles she never knew but remembered all her life and whose deaths she described as "an utter, utter, utter waste." Lib, who died last November aged 96, would have appreciated an event for peace on this anniversary which she would have seen as an invitation not to glorify war but to reflect on its futility.

Freshwater West

An unprecedented gathering of community Choirs, Choruses and singers will come together in the capital of Wales - the ‘Land of Song’ to help transform lives in Ghana by singing for water at an event at Roald Dahl Plas (the Oval Basin, Cardiff Bay) on Sunday 31st May 2015. Individual choir performances start at 1pm at venues around the Oval Basin, and the massed choir performance is at 3pm.

Join the struggle!

Welcome One & All to the 7th Bristol Anarchist Bookfair, once again at the Trinity Centre in Bristol, on Saturday 25 April, from 11am – 6pm.