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Located in London ( Strand,Waterloo and London Bridge ) this village brings everyone in one place.
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has added a new journalOur Global Gazans Charity Event takes place in London, on Sunday 22nd February from 6.00pm - 9.30pm, in aid of the victims of the Gaza crisis.
It will be held in Central London (W1) near Edgware Road. It is ?15 for a ticket which includes a dinner and entertainment. There will also be well-known speakers and the chance to socialise and network with like-minded individuals who all believe in this cause.
You can find out more at amalaction.com where you can purchase your ticket, make a donation, and view our video.
THE PRICE OF ONE TICKET WILL PROVIDE MEDICAL SUPPLIES, BLANKETS, FOOD, AND SHELTER FOR SO MANY CHILDREN WHO ARE SUFFERING. You will also be helping us increase awareness about Palestine and help us stand up for the rights of Palestinians.
Confirmed speakers include Lauren Booth, Ken O' Keefe (journalist/ activists, Aloha Palestine), Daniel Machover (British-Israeli human rights lawyer), Naji Tamimi (broadcaster), Betty Hunter (Palestine Solidarity Campaign), and Renee Bowyer (Free Gaza Movement)
With performances by Lowkey MC and special guests
Plus an auction including signed Amir Khan boxing gloves, a signed Pakistan cricket team shirt and art work
And special broadcast messages on the night by Yvonne Ridley (activist) and Azzam Tamimi (Palestinian academic)
Freely traded Palestinian goods by Zaytoun will also be on sale.
All proceeds from this event will go straight to these charities and organisations: Aloha Palestine, Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Free Gaza Movement. We cannot forget about our Muslim brothers and sisters suffering in the Occupied Palestinian Territories - so this is your chance to help.
Amal Action amalaction.com
For queries, or to reserve a ticket email [email protected]
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has added a new journalAre you divorced or separated
Are you tired of the dearth of naseeb villages and discussions for people like yourself who have things they'd like to discuss around divorcing/ separation
Then join Tabula-Rasa village ----------------------> www5.naseeb.com
( also open to others who may have a valid reason to participate )
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has added a new journalFrom schoolgirl Emma to Asma, the Syrian icon
Asma Akhras was raised in London. Today she returns as wife of Syria's leader. Peter Beaumont talks exclusively to the woman who has become a symbol of President Bashar Assad's ambition to reform his country
When Asma Akhras became Mrs Assad, new wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the doom-mongers in the British media predicted a life of subservience and isolation for the attractive British-born and educated young merchant banker. So when she dropped out of sight for a few months after her private wedding on New Year's Day 2001, they must have thought that they had got it right.
Instead, as they will find out this week, they got it very wrong indeed. So what happened in the months after the wedding, when she seemed to disappear from view? In her first-ever interview, Mrs Assad told The Observer that she did not disappear. Instead, she spent the first weeks of her marriage in jeans and T-shirt, travelling incognito around the rural areas of Syria.
After a wedding in which only the closest family members had been invited to a private service, she wanted to get a handle on the country.
'To be honest,' she says, 'I wanted to meet before they met me. Before the world met me,' she adds. 'I was able to spend the first couple of months wandering around, meeting other Syrian people. It was my crash course.
I would just tag along with one of the many programmes being run in the rural areas. Because people had no idea who I was, I was able to see people completely honestly, I was able to see what their problems were on the ground, what people are complaining about, what the issues are. What people's hopes and aspirations are.
And seeing it first-hand means you are not seeing it through someone else's eyes. It wasn't to spy on them. It was really just to see who they are, what they are doing.'
Tonight Asma Assad - the girl once known as Emma at her Church of England school in west London, where she grew up - will be back in Britain for only the second time since her wedding two years ago. But this time it will not be for a visit to her parents' home in Acton, but to accompany her husband to Downing Street for Syria's first official visit.
In three days, she will be presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace and later meet Prince Charles, not as the submissive consort that some glibly predicted, but as an equal partner of her husband, Bashar. How equal is made clear when President Assad, a 35-year-old former doctor who trained in London as an opthalmologist, comes in at the end of this interview with his wife in Damascus.
The President asks for the microphones to be turned off and my notebook to be put away. He wants to chat, but it is not an interview. And for a moment, with the constraints of protocol and diplomacy stripped away, as they sit together on a sofa, you have an insight into their life together: a lively, humorous dialogue in which they lob ideas between them like a tennis ball.
This week Asma Assad will continue on her rapid learning curve. Not that her visit will be without controversy. Even before an interview in Friday's Times, in which President Assad said he 'understood' why young Palestinians became suicide bombers, and expressed his deep reservations over the United States' rush to war against Iraq, Israeli and Jewish groups were protesting at the visit, accusing his country of sponsoring terrorism.
Others challenge his country's record on human rights, in particular the violent suppression of Islamic radical groups under his father, Hafez. And for decades Syria was identified in the West with Iraq as one of the most despotic regimes in the region, banning dissent and independent media, and virulently opposing the existence of the state of Israel.
Things have changed since Bashar's succession, insist British officials. But it has been a mixed picture so far. While Assad has invited criticism of his regime, shut prisons linked to rights abuses, and freed prominent opposition figures, other dissidents were arrested this year.
Access to the internet is permitted and there has been some liberalisation of the media. But his desire to 'reform and modernise' his country has so far had only mixed results against the opposition of hardliners who preferred his father's tough approach.
All this has had the effect of thrusting Asma Assad further into the limelight. In just two years, she has been transformed from being unknown to ordinary Syrians to being a kind of icon of both her husband' s policy to modernise and reform his country, and Syria's wider engagement with the West.
This has been achieved without the kind of personality cult that surrounds her husband and his family. In Damascus, posters of Bashar compete with pictures of his father, who led Syria in its darkest times, and Bashar's brother Basil, his father's heir-apparent, who died in a car crash in 1994.
But there are no posters of Asma. Instead she is known almost universally as al akilatu al rais: simply the President's wife. Her new prominence has been achieved while avoiding interviews, avoiding the kind of meaningless feel-good statements of what she plans to do, and while protecting her privacy.
And when she does talk, it is not in generalities. It is about the specifics of the schemes that interest her and that she has initiated: about the intricacies of micro-credit schemes tailored to Syrian society and rural life, about her country's social capital, and about her ambitions to bridge the gap between Syria's information-rich and information-poor.
FIDROS, the NGO she founded in July 2001, is the result both of those first months of incognito research and of the realisation that Syria faces a demographic problem. Forty-five per cent of the population is under 15. Fearing the destabilising impact of a massive influx to the cities, her NGO is aimed at improving village communities through sustainable development and interest-free loans.
What is clear is that this is not some Evita-like first lady's 'hobby horse'. Asma Assad regards it as her work.
She explains her reticence until now to talk about her life and work: 'I let actions speak for themselves, rather than saying "I want to... I will" and so forth. The results are much larger and much bigger than any words that anybody can say, and that's the philosophy I've had from day one. I think that's probably something I took from the UK. Let the actions speak for themselves.
'I obviously am not going to speak on his behalf, but he did know from day one that I was a working woman. He knew JP Morgan took up a lot of my time. So he knew that work for me was a big priority and still is. So it never really came up in conversation.'
And although she denies it, it still seems a remarkable journey. Three years ago Asma Assad was working in mergers and acquisitions at the bankers JP Morgan. She had been accepted for a Harvard MBA. The daughter of Syrian parents - her father is a cardiologist - they insisted on speaking Syrian at home. 'I didn't realise until I was seven that they could actually speak English,' she says.
But for all the annual holidays in Syria, she had an English childhood and education, culminating in a degree in computer science at King's College.
She casts some light, too, on how she came to know Bashar, an issue much speculated on, although with little accuracy. 'It is not quite as grand as the British press is trying to make out. We have been friends for a very long time. I came to Syria every year since I was born.
It is really through family friends who knew each other since childhood.'
So their friendship became something else while he was studying in England? 'We hardly saw each other at all. And, if we did, it was more on a friendly basis and nothing else.' I ask when she knew they would be married. 'The day before,' she laughs.
Our meeting is in the Presidential Palace in Damascus, a place of vast halls and marble floors. But when I ask about the transition from the London suburbs to life in a palace, she laughs again: 'We don't live in a palace. We live in a house in the city. This is just an official place for meeting people.'
Indeed, she goes out of her way to insist on the normality of her life. The couple dine in public restaurants, visit the theatre and have no nanny for their toddler, Hafez. I ask her, as a mother in a country next to Iraq, if she is not afraid of these dangerous times.
'I think the Middle East has always had this feeling. We are constantly aware of it, and we live in the situation. Am I aware of it specifically? I think it is part of our life. It exists. The question here is how long do we live with that? And how do we ensure we keep moving?'
And to keep moving - they both insist - a dialogue is necessary. This week's visit to Britain is part of that dialogue.
I ask her about her sense of identity, about being Emma the English schoolgirl and Asma the Syrian daughter; about being the British banker and the Syrian President's wife.
'I can't say I was "Emma". No. I wasn't Emma. I was "Emma", as you call somebody sweetheart or sweetie or darling or so forth,' she insists.
'I was born in London. I spent 25 years in London. But I also know that I am Syrian. I speak the language fluently; I read and write it. I am British and I am an Arab,' she says emphatically. 'I am not one or the other. I am part of both worlds.'
It is an issue of identity that concerns both her husband and herself, conscious that, against the background of the activities of Osama bin Laden and the threat of war with Iraq, being an Arab or Muslim has become suspect to many in the West.
Bashar Assad is understood to be concerned that, in the West, there is at the moment a 'narrowing of the mind' when it comes to those who live in the Middle East, a view shared by his wife, who blames Western media for many of the current problems. 'I think it's just living with different faiths, different beliefs and ideas,' she says.
'You cannot, like children, say "the Arab world, the British world". Is there someone who is artificially British like that? I doubt that.
'It is not accurate to label the Arab world as one big block. It is not accurate to label Islam, the Islamic world, as one big block, as I'm sure that Europe is not labelled. It is just Europe - made up of several countries, various cultures, various civilisations, histories and even languages. The Arab world is very similar.
'The Arab world is not just one block. We're all human beings, we all wish for prosperity, we all wish for better health for our children, better education for our children; for better standards of living and quality of life regardless of where we live, and that is really what unites us.
The differences - if you want to call them differences - are just a misunderstanding. Civilisation is humanity. I think we all want the same thing.'
from observer.guardian.co.uk
footnote - Bashar Al Assad succeded his father as president due to the wisehs of the syrian people (more like a monarchy than a presidency in that sense)
and Asma Akhras was in my year, on the same course as me at King's.
also thescotsman.scotsman.com
computerwala
Salaams, I was in the same course (Information System Engineering with Management). I wish Asma/Emma the best. She is taking on the biggest challenge amongst us as a first lady of Syria. It is a land that has many challenges and opportunities. I hope she is able to tap into her resource of King's friends to achieve greater goals for Syria. Hamad SheikhAfaq
fine her name is........
Labs
don't believe you ;)
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has added a new journal
TO RAISE FUNDS FOR VICTIMS OF THE EARTHQUAKE DISASTER IN PAKISTAN.
SUNDAY 27TH NOVEMBER
C& L COUNTRY CLUB, LONDON
* * DINNER, STAND UP COMEDY, FASHION SHOW, MUSIC, SALSA LESSON... * *
all organised by us.. yes that means you!!
WE WELCOME UR IDEAS...
CONTACT:
MAIN ORGANISERS:FUN_NY, Honey911, Labs, Zia
VOLUNTEERS
BEAUTIFUL_MIND
Fizzaro
Alitech
morals
metroman
chand_ni
chalchali
dr_of_drs
FUN_NY
poet4u
humanseasons
afaq
redhead
labs
(please let me know if i have left anyone out, we need an updated accurate list at all times.)
We want more volunteers!!
Contact labs
........ or fun_ny
........ or honey911
for more info
Thanks
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has added a new journalDear Friends,
The worst quake in known history has hit Pakistan, India and Afghanistan; the rising estimated death toll is 40,000. The devastation near the epicentre, in the towns and villages of Muzzafarabad, Kot Lakhpat, Balakot and Mansehra is so severe that some villages have disappeared off the map. The most severely hit region is Kashmir where about 30,000 are feared dead. In North West Pakistan, school buildings collapsed, residential walls have maimed residents and rescue work is daunting due to inaccessible roads and bad weather. In Islamabad a 10 story residential building collapsed alongwith its residents; an estimated 100 still lie beneath the debris.
The way the world has responded to the call of charity is heartening, but still insignificant. Only a massive global effort can rebuild the lives of the people affected. Please extend your help. The greatest tragedy is the complete lack of resources within the country to help the most needy. Please make cheques payable as below or donate online.
UK British Red Cross
Make a secure online donation (credit or debit card) www.redcross.org.uk cachefixer=
Give over the phone by ringing 08450 53 53 53
or send a cheque payable to British Red Cross Asian Earthquake Appeal to:
British Red Cross - Asian Earthquake Appeal
Freepost
LON18968
Sheffield
S98 1ZA
USA Edhi International Foundation
42-07 National street
Corona, New York, 11368 USA
Tel: (718) 639-5120
Fax: (718) 335-1978
Also -
My friends and I are involved in the PPR fund
Please help if you can - Pakistani Professionals Redevelopment Fund: HELP BUILD HOMES IN PAKISTAN
A group of Pakistani professionals has decided to not sit idle, but to do something about the earthquake devastation in Pakistan. They are setting up a fund, with the aim to rebuild at least one village in Pakistan, ideally more. This fund will be audited for transparency and integrity (on a pro bono basis), and should give us an opportunity to give direct help.
Initially, we do not need money!!!!!
WE NEED GOOD IDEAS AND MOTIVATED PEOPLE WHO ARE WILLING TO CONTRIBUTE THEIR TIME FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THIS FUND.
YOU can HELP!
We request all our friends internationally to come together with ideas and suggestions to allow us to work with a group in Pakistan which will co-ordinate their efforts. Then eventually we will organise a group of professionals who can help with the actual rebuilding work; the idea could go further than mere rebuilding and give people means of sustenance eg. small business ventures.
With this we turn to you for advice and ideas.
After the tragedy in our country, we feel it is our responsibility as those blessed with the means and good fortune to help those who are suffering and have lost all they had.
Please write to [email protected] with your ideas..
The website will be in place soon.
... and please forward this email to your friends ...
Thank you for reading!
Labina
........ pic: A resident from Kashmir sent a news agency this photo of the collapsed boundary wall of his house .......