Gen Relativ Gravit (2011) 43:929–932 DOI 10.1007/s10714-010-1131-0 EDITORIAL Editorial on the special issue: Selected papers from the 2nd Joint Italian-Pakistani Workshop on Relativistic Astrophysics F. De Paolis · A. Qadir · R. Ruffini Published online: 14 December 2010 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 This is a special issue of the journal in which selected papers that were presented in the Second Joint Italian-Pakistani Workshop on Relativistic Astrophysics held in July 2009 at ICRANet, Pescara, Italy are published. This series of Workshops started in June 2007 with a meeting at the University of Salento, Lecce, Italy. It arose from a long time collaboration between the Department of Physics of the Salento University at Lecce, Italy and the Centre for Advanced Mathematics and Physics, National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan, which was formalized in 2006. The connection between the two Universities had begun due to two of us (FD and AQ) meeting in Rome, where the former was a student of the third (RR) and the latter was a guest of RR. As such, the first Workshop was dedicated to RR. The proceedings were published as a special issue of Nuovo Cimento B, volume 122, number 5, pages 465–616, (officially) in May 2007. The second Workshop was dedicated to John Archibald Wheeler (“Johnny” to his friends and collaborators), who had died on April 13, 2008. The reasons for this F. De Paolis Dipartimento di Fisica, Università del Salento, Via Arnesano, 73100 Lecce, Italy e-mail: francesco.depaolis@le.infn.it F. De Paolis INFN, Sezione di Lecce, 73100 Lecce, Italy A. Qadir (B ) Center for Advanced Mathematics and Physics, National University of Sciences and Technology, H-12, Islamabad, Pakistan e-mail: aqadirmath@yahoo.com R. Ruffini International Centre for Relativistic Astrophysics Network, Piazza della Repubblica 10, 65122 Pescara, Italy e-mail: ruffini@icra.it 123