Bilquis Bano Edhi HI (Urdu: بلقیس ایدھی‎), widow of Abdul Sattar Edhi, is a professional nurse and one of the most active philanthropists in Pakistan along with serving as co-chair of Edhi Foundation. She has been named The Mother of Pakistan. She was born in 1947 in Bantva. She heads the Edhi Foundation, and with her husband received the 1986 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service In 2015, she received the Mother Teresa Memorial International Award for Social Justice. Her charity runs many services in Pakistan including a hospital and emergency service in Karachi. Together with her husband their charity has saved over 16,000 unwanted babies. Her husband, Abdul Sattar Edhi, died on 8 July 2016.

Biography

When she was a teenager she was not enjoying school and managed to join a small expanding dispensary as a nurse in 1965. At the time the Edhi home was in the old city area of Karachi known as Mithadar where it had been founded in 1951. The small number of Christian and Hindu nurses who worked there had just reduced in number. The founder, Abdul Sattar Edhi, recruited a number of nurses including Bilquis who, unusually, was from a Muslim background.

Her future husband proposed to her after recognizing her talents and allowing her to lead the small nursing department. He had recognized her enthusiasm and interest during her six-month training program where she had learnt basic midwifery and healthcare. They were married when she was seventeen and her husband was nearly twenty years older. Their honeymoon was unusual in that the newlyweds discovered a young girl with head injuries at their dispensary just after their wedding ceremony. Edhi said in 1989 that she did not regret the time lost in consoling the twelve year old’s concerned relatives or supervising blood transfusions as now “… that girl is married with children; that’s what is really important.” The Edhi Foundation’s unofficial website uses the line “Making a difference and changing lives forever”.

Edhi took over the management of the jhoolas project, the first of which had been built by her husband in 1952. These 300 cradles are available throughout Pakistan where parents can abandon unwanted children or those that cannot be raised. They carry the message “Do not kill, leave the baby to live in the cradle” in English and Urdu. A small minority of abandoned children are disabled but over 90% are female. This alternative is thought to have reduced the number of dead babies who are killed by their own parents given the alternative provided by the Edhi Foundation to leave the unwanted babies in the cradles. The Edhi project is also responsible for burying dead babies found by the police.

Recognition

Edhi and her husband have received a number of awards in recognition of their work. In July 2007 they were publicly recognised for their work by President Pervez Musharraf who made a contribution of 100,000 rupees (from his own pocket) and he particularly noted that their work provided social services to the poor of Pakistan without any discrimination. This contribution contrasts sharply with another offered by President Zia ul-Haq which was turned down because of the strings that were attached. It also contrasts with the 100,000 dollars that her husband gave to Pakistani workers in the USA affected by the 9/11 bombing. Despite her husband being received by Presidents and her own appearance on Pakistani television the couple lived modestly in a two-room apartment which is part of one of their orphanages.

Stephen Soldz (born 19 November 1952) is a psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, professor, and anti-war activist. Soldz is director of the Social Justice and Human Rights program at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.

He has received media attention as a vocal critic regarding allegations of the use of psychological torture by the U.S. government in its conduct of the War in Iraq and the War on Terror.

In August 2007, Soldz publicly challenged the American Psychological Association to ban the involvement by professional psychologists in the interrogation of ‘enemy combatant’ prisoners held by the CIA and Defense Department. Soldz, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, publicly accused psychologists attached to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay of developing and applying torture techniques on detainees while advising interrogators on the levels of abuse that detainees could withstand. In November 2007, Soldz coauthored an article on psychological torture at Guantanamo Bay with Julian Assange, published via WikiLeaks.

The American Psychological Association did not pass the ban advocated by Soldz, but instead issued a resolution stating its opposition to torture and restricting its members from participating in interrogations that involved practices that could be defined as torture.

Additionally, Soldz, in his role as the publisher of the Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report web site, has written for Znet website questioning the accuracy in reporting the number of Iraqi civilian deaths since the March 2003 invasion and has challenged claims that the al-Jazeera television network was supportive of Saddam Hussein. He has also written opinion columns on the Iraq war for the Daily Kos web site.

Outside of politics, Soldz and Leigh McCullough co-edited the 1999 book Reconciling Empirical Knowledge and Clinical Experience: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, published by the American Psychological Association. Also in 1999, Soldz and George E. Vaillant published their article “The Big Five Personality Traits and the Life Course: A 45-Year Longitudinal Study” in the ‘Journal of Research in Personality. The journal’s editors later named the Soldz-Vaillant article as the publication’s most important paper for that year.

Fritjof Capra (born February 1, 1939) is an Austrian-born American physicist, systems theorist and deep ecologist. In 1995, he became a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California. He is on the faculty of Schumacher College.

Capra is the author of several books, including The Tao of Physics (1975), The Turning Point (1982), Uncommon Wisdom (1988), The Web of Life (1996), The Hidden Connections (2002) and The Systems View of Life (2014). Some of his writings has been set to music by British composer Jane Sinclair Wells.

Life and work

Born in Vienna, Austria, Capra attended the University of Vienna, where he earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1966. He conducted research in particle physics and systems theory at the University of Paris (1966–1968), the University of California, Santa Cruz (1968–1970), the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (1970), Imperial College, London (1971–1974) and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (1975–1988). While at Berkeley, he was a member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, founded in May 1975 by Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, which met weekly to discuss philosophy and quantum physics.[3] He also taught at U.C. Santa Cruz, U.C. Berkeley, and San Francisco State University.

He has written popular books on the implications of science, notably The Tao of Physics, subtitled An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. The Tao of Physics asserts that both physics and metaphysics lead inexorably to the same knowledge. After touring Germany in the early 1980s, Capra co-wrote Green Politics with ecofeminist author Charlene Spretnak in 1984.

He is fluent in German, English, French and Italian.

Capra contributed to the screenplay for the 1990 movie Mindwalk, starring Liv Ullmann, Sam Waterston and John Heard. The film is loosely based on his book, The Turning Point.

In 1991 Capra co-authored Belonging to the Universe with David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk. Using Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as a stepping stone, the book explores parallels between new paradigm thinking in science and in religion; the authors posit that, together, these new paradigms offer remarkably compatible views about the universe.

Capra advocates that Western culture abandon conventional linear thought and the mechanistic views of Descartes. Critiquing the reductionistic Cartesian view that everything can be studied in parts to understand the whole, he encourages a holistic approach. In The Web of Life, Capra focuses on systemic information generated by the relationships among all parts as a significant additional factor in understanding the character of the whole, emphasizing the web-like structure of all systems and the interconnectedness of all parts.

He is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy located in Berkeley, California, which promotes ecology and systems thinking in primary and secondary education.

Fritjof Capra is an Earth Charter International Council member.

Bibliography

The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (1975), Capra’s first book, challenges conventional wisdom by demonstrating striking parallels between Vedic and Oriental mystical traditions and the discoveries of 20th century physics. Originally published by a small publisher with no budget for promotion, the book became a bestseller by word of mouth until it was picked up by a major American publishing house. It has now been published in 43 editions in 23 languages.
The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (1982) explains perceived scientific and economic crises. It begins by outlining and tracing the history of science and economics, highlighting the flaws in the Cartesian, Newtonian, and reductionist paradigms. It explains how such viewpoints have grown inadequate for modern technology and ecology needs, then argues that science needs to develop the concepts and insights of holism and systems theory to solve society’s complex problems.
Green Politics (1984), co-authored by Charlene Spretnak, analyzes the rise of the Green Party in Germany and similar ecology-oriented political parties in other European countries. It has been published in 7 editions in 4 languages.
Uncommon Wisdom (1988) describes dialogues and personal encounters between himself and the thinkers who helped to shape the theme of The Turning Point. It has been published in 16 editions and 12 languages.
Belonging to the Universe: Explorations on the Frontiers of Science and Spirituality (1993) was coauthored by David Steindl-Rast and Thomas Matus. The book explores parallels between ways of thinking in science and Christian theology. It has been published in 10 editions in 7 languages.
The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (1996) starts from the conceptual framework presented in The Turning Point, summarizes the mathematics of complexity, and offers a synthesis of recent nonlinear theories of living systems that have dramatically increased our understanding of the key characteristics of life. Capra makes extensive reference to the work of Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Ilya Prigogine, Gregory Bateson and others in proposing a new, systems-based scientific approach for describing the interrelationships and interdependence of psychological, biological, physical, social, and cultural phenomena. The book has been published in 14 editions in 10 languages.
The Hidden Connections (2002) extends the framework of systems and complexity theory to the social domain and uses the extended framework to discuss some of the critical issues of our time.
The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (2007). Its central idea is that Leonardo da Vinci’s science is a science of living forms, of quality, which can be seen as a distant forerunner of today’s complexity and systems theories. The book has been published in 7 editions in 5 languages.
Learning from Leonardo: Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius (2013), offers a glimpse into the works of the prescient thinker, Leonardo da Vinci, whose pioneering genius contributed to many scientific fields.
The Systems View of Life (2014), co-authored by Pier Luigi Luisi, offers radical solutions to twenty-first century challenges by focusing on the connected world and examining life through its inextricably linked systems

Yanghee Lee (Korean: 이양희; Hanja: 李亮喜, born 24 July 1956) is a South Korean developmental psychologist and professor at Sungkyunkwan University. She is most noted for her work in international human rights organisations.

Education

Lee earned her undergraduate (B.S.) degree from Georgetown University. She later undertook postgraduate studies at the University of Missouri and earned an M.ED. and Ph.D

Human rights works and United Nations career

Yanghee Lee currently serves on the Advisory committee of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea. She is the founding President of the International Child Rights Center, a non-profit organization based in Seoul. In 2009, she received the Order of Civil Merit, the highest recognition given to a civilian in Korea, for her work in human rights.

Lee served as chairperson of the Committee on the Rights of the Child under the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2007 to 2011. She also served as chairperson of the Meeting of Chairpersons of Human Rights Treaty Bodies from 2010 to 2011.

Lee was appointed special rapporteur of the UN on the situation of human rights in Myanmar first established in 1992 under the Commission on Human Rights Resolution 58 and extended annually. Following usual practice, her appointment as special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar was extended for one year in March 2019. The Myanmar government, however, has denied access to Yanghee Lee.

Lee is highly recognized nationally, regionally, and internationally for her expertise in human rights. She has published numerous articles and books on human rights and children’s rights. She was awarded the 2009 Human Rights Award of Korea, as winner.

Titles, awards and honours

2009: Human Rights Award of Korea as Winner, National Human Rights Commission of Korea