Byubyusara Ryskulova – Kyrgyzstan

Linked with Crisis Center for Women and Family SEZIM, with Kyrgyzstan, Domestic Violence, Tradition Or Crime? and with Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « I prefer to work with the people, giving them real help and support. Our activity is not restricted to the borders of our Republic. All those who need our help, will get it ».

Kyrgyzstan: Domestic Violence, Tradition Or Crime? by Bermet Egemberdieva, June 20, 2006. At least 17 women have died in Kyrgyzstan in the past two years at the hands of physically abusive husbands. It is a sad reminder that many Kyrgyz women are unable to escape the horrors of domestic violence. Statistics from the country’s crisis shelters — where many of the most serious cases end up — suggest that 80 to 90 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s victims of domestic violence are women.

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Byubyusara Ryskulova – Kyrgyzstan

She works for the Psychological Crisis Center for Women and Families SEZIM. (Website in russian).

Byubyusara Ryskulova is a human rights activist dedicated to preventing domestic abuse and protecting those who have been victimized. She founded the first domestic violence prevention center in Kyrgyzstan. This organization is committed to assisting and rehabilitating abused women, providing protection for victims, researching the roots of violence within the Kyrgyz society, and the education of rights. Byubyusara gives hope to many people. She carries out her mission against violence through peaceful measures including seminars, campaigns, advocacy, protests, and education.

Byubyusara Ryskulova is Director of the Psychological Crisis Center for Women and Families « Sezim » in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She is from the village of Belogorka in the Chuysk Region of the Kyrgyz Republic. Coming from a family of rural workers, her life took a different turn at the age of nine when she left her native village to study music at boarding school in the capital city of Bishkek. Independence and adult responsibility came early for Byubyusara.

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Itsmania Erohyna Pineda Platero – Honduras

Linked with ¿QUIÉN ES ITSMANIA PINEDA PLATERO?

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « The person who, in his neighborhood, is depreciated for being a criminal or a drug addict, or a thief, in Xibalbá is treated and respected as a useful and important person, as an artist ».

She says also: “The Mayan people believed that hell was to be found in their personal encounter with selfishness, envy and all that that oppresses happiness. Xibalbá was the God of hell, not the hell conceived by Christians, but a hell, which is located inside each person … « .

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Itsmania Erohyna Pineda Platero – Honduras

She works for Xibalbá, Arte y Cultura.

Honduras is a country broken by the chronic inequality that has excluded young people from the centers of economic and cultural opportunity, forcing them to survive on the margins of society, with the violence and inscrutability of the gangs. With the foundation, in 1989, of Xibalbá, Itsmania Pineda created a space and an opportunity where young people have the chance to change their lives and channel their artistic energies into different socially beneficial projects.

With these activities they are able to discover new identities, based on admiration and respect from the community.The director of an important Honduran newspaper called her to intercede on behalf of one of his photographers who had been threatened by a gang called Mara Salvatrucha. As the president of Xibalbá, Itsmania Pineda was a recognized social activist in Honduras and respected for her work for the defence and social rehabilitation of the gangs called maras.

She knew very well that the territory where that particular mara operated was a neighbourhood near to Tegucigalpa, the capital city. It was not very advisable to walk in those streets by night. But at dusk she decided to go there accompanied by her husband and another woman from the organization.

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Stephen A. Marglin – USA

Professor Stephen Marglin holds the Walter S Barker Chair in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. Over a career that now spans more than four decades, he has contributed to various aspects of economic theory, including benefit-cost analysis, economic development, the organization of work, and the relationship between growth and distribution. One theme running through this distinguished career has been a concern with development economics. Beginning with his work in the 60s as an advisor to the Indian Planning Commission, Marglin has questioned the assumption that development equates to nothing more than growth of GNP. More broadly, Marglin’s professional life has been an attempt to change the way economists think about economics – to get economists to see the whole enterprise of economics as one way of seeing the world rather than the way of seeing the world. His latest effort towards this goal is the forthcoming book: The Dismal Science: How Thinking like an Economist Undermines Community. (text source).

And with other new members he is newly-elected Chair of the Executive Committee of the World Future Council.

Listen to his video, 3.42 min., from World Future Council.

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Stephen A. Marglin – USA

Read: Radical Interpretation of Economic History (what do bosses do?), part one, 28 pages; same, part two, 19 pages.

Read: Science, Technology, and International Development.

Read: Rethinking the Western Model of Modernity.

He asks:

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Toita Yunusova – Russian Federation

Linked with Zarema Omarova – Russian Federation, and with Fatima Gazieva – Russian Federation.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « I cannot conceive of a higher aim for myself than helping orphaned and disabled children who are the victims of the cruel war in the Republic of Chechnya ».

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Toita Yunusova – Russian Federation

She works for Ekho Voiny / Echo of War (mentionned on Prague Watchdog).

Since 1995 Toita Yunusova has actively participated in the anti-war movement trying to stop the bloodshed in Chechnya. She is a peace activist and a member of the NGO Ekho Voiny (Echo of War). Working on humanitarian projects to help refugees in the Caucasus region and cooperating with Russian NGOs fighting for a peaceful solution to the Chechen problem, Toita has collected photo and video materials which she hopes will become evidence of war crimes and human rights violations in Chechnya.

Toita Yunusova was born in 1966 in a village high in the mountains of Checheno-Ingushetia. She is an farmer by trade. After graduating from the Vocational School of Farming in Sernovodsk, Toita worked as a brigadier in a vineyard in the Naur region and later as a nurse in the Ivushka kindergarten.

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Chalmers Johnson – USA

Linked with AntiWar.com, with JPRI The Japan Policy Research Institute; with about Chalmers Johnson’s “Nemesis »-book, with Iraqi Wars – (or how to end it?), and with his presentation of February 19, 2006.

Chalmers Ashby Johnson is an author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He is also president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute, an organization promoting public education about Japan and Asia. He has written numerous books including, most recently, three examinations of the consequences of American Empire. (full text).

Read: Empire v. Democracy, Why Nemesis Is at Our Door, February 1, 2007.

He says: ”In early 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, I was putting the finishing touches on my portrait [The Sorrows of Empire] of the global reach of American military bases. In it, I suggested the sorrows already invading our lives, which were likely to be our fate for years to come: perpetual war, a collapse of constitutional government, endemic official lying and disinformation, and finally bankruptcy. At book’s end, I advocated reforms intended to head off these outcomes but warned that ‘failing such a reform, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us » … (full text).

Read: Cold Warrior in a Strange Land, March 22, 2006.

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Chalmers Johnson – USA

He works for the Japan Policy Research Institute JPRI.

Read: Republic or empire: A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States, January 2007.

Listen to his longer interview on AntiWarRadio (February 5, 2007).

See his blog: The American Empire Project.

He says also: « By the end of the first century BC, Rome had seemingly, again, « inadvertently » acquired an empire that surrounded the entire Mediterranean Sea. They then discovered that the inescapable accompaniment, the Siamese twin of imperialism, is militarism. You start needing standing armies. You start having armies that are demobilized, of men who have done nothing but spend all their lives in the military. It’s expensive to pay them. You have to now provide them, in the Roman Empire, with farms or things of this sort. They become irritated with the state. And then along comes the military populist, the figure who says, « I understand your problems. I represent your interests against the Roman Senate. » And, certainly, Julius Caesar is the model for this. « The only requirement is that I become life dictator for this » — Napoleon Bonaparte, Juan Peron, this type of figure.

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Lester Brown – USA

Linked with Earth Policy Institute, with Plan B 2.0, and with Search for an Eco-Economy.

Lester Russell Brown (born 1934) is an environmental analyst who has written several books on global environmental issues. He is the founder of the Worldwatch Institute and founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute which is a nonprofit research organization in Washington, D.C. Though he has written over twenty books, he is best known for Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble. With books in more than forty languages, he is one of the world’s most widely published authors …  » (full text).

Read: ENVIRONMENT: Replanting the Planet, Analysis by Lester R. Brown, July 10, 2007.

Listen to his speech on poptech.com, (no time indication).

He says: ”Our global civilization today is on an economic path that is environmentally unsustainable, a path that is leading us toward economic decline and eventual collapse ».

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Lester Brown – USA

Read: Bill Boyne: Corn that fuels cars can’t fill stomachs, June 29, 2007.

Listen to his videos on google (with hereafter a short selection):

He says also answering the question, ‘Can the Earth support three billion more people?’: « The question is, if we look at it just in food terms, at what level of living? If we’re talking about living at food-consumption levels today of, say, the average person in India, then the current world harvest can support 10 billion people. But if we’re talking about the U.S. level of consumption, then we’re talking about a world that will support two and a half billion people.

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Richard Rodriguez – USA

Linked with Mexicans in America, and with Keynote Address by RICHARD RODRIGUEZ …

Richard Rodriguez (born 31 July 1944) is a Mexican-American writer who became famous for his 1981 book, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (ISBN 0-553-27293-4), a narrative about his development as a literate, American student. (full text).

He says: ”Bilingual-education advocates say it’s important to teach a child in his or her family’s language. I say you can’t use family language in the classroom — the very nature of the classroom requires that you use language publicly. When the Irish nun said to me, « Speak your name loud and clear so that all the boys and girls can hear you, » she was asking me to use language publicly, with strangers. That’s the appropriate instruction for a teacher to give. If she were to say to me, « We are going to speak now in Spanish, just like you do at home. You can whisper anything you want to me, and I am going to call you by a nickname, just like your mother does, » that would be inappropriate. Intimacy is not what classrooms are about ». (full text).

The Browning of America is a phrase coined by Rodriguez to describe an increase in the mixing of cultural, racial, and ethnic identities in the United States during the late 20th and early 21st century. (full text).

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Richard Rodriguez – USA

Richard Rodriguez is a contributing editor at New America Media in San Francisco. He writes regularly for several newspapers and magazines, both in the United States and in England. He has also written an autobiographical trilogy on class, ethnicity and race: « Hunger of Memory » (1982) « Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father, » (1992) and « Brown: The Last Discovery of America » (2002). He is currently working on a book concerned with the ecology of the desert and monotheism. (full text).

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Jianhua Wang – China

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « To this, my whole heart I have given, and from it, not a rock I shall keep. Tao Xin Zhi, the great educator, has shown us the way. We shall only do better ».

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Jianhua Wang – China

She works for the Xin Zhi Women’s Vocational School.

Wang Jianhua is one of the most influential people in private education in China. Since quitting her government job in 1989, she has invested every penny of her own and her family’s to establish the Xin Zhi Women’s Vocational School, which caters especially for young women from villages and rural areas. In the past 15 years the school has helped thousands of young women to find jobs, enabling them to pursue their dreams.

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Jiuhua Wu – China

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

Wu Jiuhua is chairperson of the Women’s Federation in Wangdu County, Hebei Province. She founded the ‘Help the Poor Children Fund’ to help alleviate poverty among young girls. She has also established more than 30 training bases to train women to change their lives of poverty.

She says: « Peace shall come only when everyone’s rights are protected ».

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Jiuhua Wu – China

She works for the Women’s Federation, Wandu County.

Wu Jiuhua had served in different posts in the village government. In 2002, she started to work as the chairperson of the Women’s Federation in Wangdu County. In whatever post, Wu worked wholeheartedly for the people.

She earned the reputation of being ‘the life saving village head’ when she was appointed to head Zhao Zhuang Village in 1999. It was an unusual year for the peasants in Zhao Zhuang Village, as their wheat fields were attacked by some kind of worms. They were very anxious when they saw the wheat stocks were being eaten by the worms but could do nothing.

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Xiaoxia Zhu – China

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

The Working Committee on Women and Children.
She says: « My goal is to share happiness and woe with the common people and take their business as my own business ».

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Xiaoxia Zhu – China

She works for the Working Committee on Women and Children, and for the Communist Party of China CPC, Xihua County Committee.

Zhu Xiaoxia has introduced scientific marital and family planning ideas into her work for women and children, and has tried to convince families that happiness does not only lie in having male children. She has appealed to the community to pay attention to the vulnerable sectors of the population and has called on local civil servants to help poor schoolchildren and Aids orphans by initiating various programs for them.

Zhu Xiaoxia was born at the end of the 1950s. She was sent to the rural areas as an educated rusticated youth during the Cultural Revolution. She became a worker after she returned to the city. Eager for knowledge she kept learning while she worked and obtained a master’s degree.

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