Seventeen years after losing her council job due to needing endometriosis surgery, Michelle Dewar’s campaign for paid menstrual leave gained 50,000 signatures in a week, reports ELIZABETH SHORT

KATE HUDSON, who has led the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) for 21 years, retired yesterday.
Yet its mobilisation today in protest at the return of US nuclear weapons to the Lakenheath air base in Suffolk has echoes of her earliest days in peace activism, when she and so many others mobilised against the deployment of US cruise missiles in the early 1980s.
“With hundreds of thousands of others, I became involved in the demonstrations at that time, as well as the women’s mobilisations at Greenham Common,” she tells the Morning Star. The power of protest worked: “Eventually, the cruise missiles were kicked out.

Morning Star editor Ben Chacko speaks to JON FARLEY – the retired headteacher whose arrest in Leeds exposes the grim absurdity of the Palestine Action ban