Mr. Rosenbaum, who has been chair of the piano department at the New England Conservatory and president of the Longy School of Music, will present a Schubert Evening. He and friends will perform pieces for piano solo, piano four hands, and piano, soprano and clarinet, as a benefit for Massachusetts Peace Action Education Fund, Sunday, October 24, at 4pm in a beautiful Cambridge home.
Please contact the office for further details or to reserve your tickets.

Legendary Northampton peace activist Frances Crowe was profiled in a front page Boston Globe story Monday.

The story is a nice one, but at the same time it perpetuates the stereotype of the peace activist as harmless, eccentric crank.   In fact, there are thousands of activists in Massachusetts who do as Frances does, and tens of millions — in fact, a majority of Americans — who want peace.    The reporter forgot to point out these simple facts.

Madelyn Hoffman of New Jersey Peace Action critiques the mainstream media’s coverage of the peace movement in OpEd News.

An Afghanistan study group report written by Matthew Hoh, the Tufts-educated former Marine who resigned from the Foreign Service over Afghanistan policy last year, has generated significant controversy in the past week.

The report, signed by some 50 former officials, scholars and policy analysts, savages the US war policy in Afghanistan, saying that it does nothing to hamper Al Qaeda and in fact strengthens the insurgency, driving Islamic groups to unite against the US, and complaining of the huge cost of the war for little or no gain.
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The Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, in a bipartisan vote, voted for the Resolution of Advice and Consent to Ratification of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) between the U.S. and Russia.   New START would cut deployed, strategic nuclear weapons.    It is a small, but necessary step towards Peace Action’s vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.

Overwhelmingly, Americans of all parties, bipartisan national security experts and military leaders agree that fewer nuclear weapons make the United States and the World a safer place.   The bipartisan vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to move the treaty to the full Senate for ratification reflects these views.  Peace Action calls on Senator Scott Brown to commit to voting for the treaty.   We need the treaty to be passed this year to continue to move the disarmament agenda forward.

Under the treaty, both countries would reduce to 1,550 deployed, long-range nuclear warheads, most of which are tens or hundreds of times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, which leveled the city and killed 140,000 people.  The treaty would reinstate a more robust verification regime that will provide the United States with critical insight into Russia’s nuclear forces.  Verification has lapsed since the START treaty expired last December.

Contact Senator Scott Brown at is 202-224-4543 or e-mail him at scottbrown.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/emailscottbrown.

Join Massachusetts Peace Action and the UJP Legislative Task Force as we review Congressional developments relating to peace issues.

Paul Kawika Martin, Political Director of Peace Action, will present updates from Washington on nuclear disarmament (e.g. the START treaty), Afghanistan related legislation, and the military budget.   He will also briefly report on his recent trip to Japan for the 65th anniversary events in Hiroshima, and to Okinawa where the presence of a US military base is strongly contested.

We will discuss the state of peace organizing in each of Massachusetts’ 10 congressional districts and make plans to exert pressure during the upcoming lame duck session and for 2011.

Refreshments will be served.   Please RSVP to cole@masspeaceaction.org