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 More coffee? Yes we can! We all need a bit of an energiser every now and then and thanks to this freebie, from Prime PR, we can now have out Obama Action Doll telling us that ‘Yes we can’ as we work. We never knew we wanted one until we got one.
We’re desperately looking for a Barroso doll and, if we’re really lucky we can find a Danny the Red one and stage toy fights – just like the real thing – in the office.
So, if you’ve got any wierd, wonderful or just plain useful freebies, send them to us and we’ll give them a good home.
 We’ve spend a good part of the morning discussing missing children in Europe, the Amber Alert, and the US sex offenders lists for an upcoming special focus. Quite some heated debate going on. Generally the feeling is that Europeans would be less likely to accept a sex offenders register.
What do people think, an EU sex offenders register – would you like to be notified if a sex offender moved into your neighborhood?
 Ismael Khatib waiting at the Israeli border The greatest pain any parent can suffer is to have a child die. This happened to Ismael Khatib, a Palestinian from the Jenin refugee camp. His twelve year old son, Ahmed, shot by Israeli soldiers, was one of many child casualties of conflict, but what happened next was extraordinary. In the Israeli hospital where Ahmed was taken, doctors failed to save him, Ismael Khatib met a nurse who explained they had many children needing organ donors and Ismael agreed to donate his sons organs. The recipients would be Israeli children, but that didn’t bother him. It bothered a lot of other people though. Attitudes are so entrenched that a humane gesture like this, especially after a violent death is rarely seen as the divides between the peoples and religions can seem insurmountable. The organs were transplanted into the children of Orthodox Jews, Druze, Bedouin and others.
One year later, Khatib toured round Israel in the company of German film maker, Marcus Vetter, and visited five of the children who had received transplants. Asked why, Khatib said, “It’s not about politics, about Jews or Arabs, it’s about human beings. I see my son in these children.” The resulting film, Heart of Jenin, is neither makwish or sentimental, but uncomfortable viewing, dealing with the divides between peoples and the complexities of individulal responses to the conflict. This is highlighted in an awkward encounter between Khatib and the Levinson family, who are Israeli settlers with uncompromising views. In Israel, the Jerusalem Film Festival refused to show the film, but later agreed. In Ramallah it was also refused because there was an Israeli film maker involved, but later they too showed it.
Khatib has since set up the Cuneo Centre for Peace, for children to learn and play in a safe environment and, under the management of Fakhri Hamad, a new project Cinema Jenin. Hamad explained, “It was very important to tell this story as it shows the Palestinians as humans and that peace is possible. There were three reasons behind the decision to donate, Ismael lost his brother when he was young from kidney failure as no donor could be found. Secondly, a nurse in the hospital told him of children who could live if they were given organs. Ismael thought that these kids had the right to live and finally, something he came to understand later, that with this decision, he can ask the world to take out the kids from the conflict, they are not guilty. They shouldn’t have to pay for the conflict and this was also a message to the Israeli army, telling them they have to stop shooting kids.”
With the support of musician, Roger Waters and director, Quentin Tarantino amongst others, the Cinema Jenin project is off to a good start, “I was working in the kids centre where we were teaching the children art and music and we decided to include more kids by expanding into a cinema that has been closed since 1987 and we can use this to educate people of all ages the culture of peace, to show them the stories of other people.” The next film is the story of an Israeli woman whose husband was killed by a suicide bomber and follows her reactions and her meeting with the bomber’s family. Khatib says “My son lived between two intifadas, he never saw a good day in his life”, to which Hamad adds, “The next intifada must be a peaceful one, of Israelis and Palestinians uniting together. The violence is killing us all.”
More information: www.cinemajenin.org
 Ismael Khatib who donated his sons organs to Israelis after the 12 year old boy was killed by an Israeli soldier. I’ve been working on two stories with the common theme of countering extremism. Yesterday, I interviewed Maajid Nawaz, co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation. He was high up in Hizb ut Tahrir for many years before being imprisoned in Cairo, where he began a path that led him to reject extremism. He’s just been to the US where he’s been briefing top US administration officials.
I also watched a fascinating documentary, The Heart Of Jenin. This tells the story of Ismael Khatib, whose twelve year old son was shot by an Israeli soldier. He donated the organs to other children and, a year later, travels to visit the recipients. This is a multi-layered film that shows the complexities of life and how bigotry and prejudice permeate the lives of people, often trapping them inside their own private world. This could have been sentimental or mawkish. Instead it is disturbing and uncomfortable.
After the film, I interviewed Fakhri Hamed, who works alongside Khatib at a chidrens centre he founded. Hamed is also the director of Cinema Jenin, a peace and reconcilliation project based around a cinema.
With the debate over Isreal and Palestine being dominated by fixed viewpoints, these people add a little light and shade, but more importantly, they may also show us the beginning of the end of the violence.
 The newspaper is paying attention to China and we have a reporter in the country, preparing some great stories and analysis for our readers. The European Commission has also been raising its profile with China and has initiated some projects on EU – China policy.
We will be reporting on this at a later date, but one of the think tanks involved has a fascinating history, one which will be causing a lot of embarrassment to those in the Charlemagne building who have been generously funding them. It promises to compete with the legendary IRELA affair. The matter is sub-judice, but not for much longer.
One project the Commission funded is the Europe China Academic Network, whose website has gone mysteriously blank. Investigation reveals that the domain name has bought last Friday by Internet.bs Corp of Nassau, the Bahamas. to be exact, it’s here in Google Maps.
This company is notorious because of spammers and fraudsters using it for buying up domain names that people have neglected to keep up to date and then use the sites for… selling pirate software!
Oh the irony.
Got this email from one of our Editors who is in Strasbourg covering the Parliament this week…
The European Parliament has a new security policy blocking skype and messenger for security reasons. We can be in contact via e-mail. We can talk via google talk, or with anyone else who has a google account and wants to add me as a contact list. That seems to be working.
It is more than a little bit annoying that this we cannot use what have become the everyday tools of communication, vital for our efficient work flow. What kind of security breach can MSN or Skype create?!?!? Anyone with an internet-enabled phone can go ahead and use them anyway.
 Dangerous programs banned from EP Just a rant from inside NE.
 I can see your soul New Europe is a very tech heavy office with pretty much everyone on Twitter, Facebook, writing articles on Google Documents, emailing from their phones etc.
You would thing that this enhances creativity and efficiency, but does it? Or does the plethora of devices and systems just get in the way, or is technology being used for avoiding work? In the old days, you could walk round an office for hours, just by holding an official looking bit of paper, today you need to have an emergenct spreadsheet a mouse click away. Check out the Hierarchy of Digital Distractions
 Swedish Party Kit One of the fun things to happen at the office is when we get sent some freebies and the arrival of the Swedish Presidency brought a courier to our door with a package. Inside we found a CD a press release from Tetra Pak and a carton of “Limited edition” Blackcurrant juice. It’s got the snazzy logo of the presidency and “a message on the role of packaging in climate change”.
The blackcurrant juice is also “being proposed as a refreshment by the authorities and the Swedish embassy during various events organised during the presidency”.
We’d rather have some Swedish vodka!
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About This Blog Written by all our staff, here we try to show what's going on behind the scenes to give you an idea of what we're working on and why.
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