PLOWSHARES vs. DEPLETED URANIUM: Steve Kelly, SJ, remains physically isolated in a Maryland state prison, serving his 27 month sentence for disarming A-10 aircraft in Maryland, December, 1999. As punishment for Kelly's refusal to submit to random urinalysis for illicit drugs, visitors are not allowed. Letters are welcome, but clippings and articles are routinely rejected, and newsletters must be sent from the publisher to reach Kelly...

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA: Seven people arrested in February during protests at a "Liberation of Kuwait" conference were convicted in a Charlottesville court May 22 and fined $25 (suspended)...

ALDERMASTON WOMEN TRASH TRIDENT: The retrial of two women who swam aboard a British Trident submarine in dock and began disarming it with hand tools, back in February, 1999, has again been postponed, this time until October, at the earliest...

MINUTEMAN III PLOWSHARES: Daniel Sicken will be released from federal prison to a halfway house in Boston on July 18 (see Inside & Out, for that address). There he will serve out his 41-month sentence for the Hiroshima Day, 1998 hammering on a Colorado nuclear missile silo, until parole on October 16...

RUSSIAN NUCLEAR REPRESSION: The rekindled espionage trial against Russian military journalist Grigory Pasko has been postponed thrice, and is now set to begin in Vladivostok July 11, and continue for at least two months. Despite the magnitude of similarities between Pasko's prosecution and that of the exonerated Alexander Nikitin, precedent has little weight in the Russian legal system. A member of Nikitin's defense team is now in Vladivostok to direct Pasko's defense. Pasko was arrested in November, 1997, and charged with treason through espionage for giving alleged secret information to a Japanese television network about the handling of nuclear waste in the Russian Pacific Fleet. The Court of the Pacific Fleet acquitted him of treason in July, 1999, but the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court canceled this verdict on November 21, 2000, and sent the case back to the lower court for new hearings. Pasko faces a minimum sentence of 12 years in prison if convicted. In a case also being watched by human rights activists, the high treason trial of Russian-American arms control expert Igor Sutyagin, begun last December, continues behind closed doors in Kaluga...

HAMILTON WAR SHOW: Fourteen people charged with mischief during June, 2000 protests at the Hamilton Air Show in Ontario were found not guilty on May 8. During testimony an Air Show official testified that the organizers had "no interest in showing the ugly face of war" despite the majority of exhibits being directly related to air combat and war planes. Immediately after the acquittal, about 40 defendants and their supporters walked around the corner from the courthouse to the office of the annual war show's producer to deliver a letter inviting dialogue on transforming the war show into one celebrating live-affirming uses of the air. The executive director rejected outright the plea of one five-year old that the "Kiddie Commando" event be pulled from the show. "Kiddie Commando" is a simulated war training obstacle course run by soldiers who shoot water guns at children as young as two years old as they make their way through the course wearing military helmets and camouflage paint. In mid-June, the show went on again, complete with "Kiddie Commando." No arrests were reported, however, as police were not asked to interrupt the many peaceful protests that occurred inside the two-day show...

DIEMACO: Criminal mischief charges against two people arrested last January at the Kitchener, Ontario, arms maker were dismissed June 20. Their sidewalk chalking of peace slogans resulted in the two being nabbed on their way home from the demonstration...