SC refuses to grant more time to Sahara to refund Rs 24,000cr

The last hope of Sahara group to get more time to refund Rs. 24,000 crore to its investors was today dashed in the Supreme Court which dismissed its plea and pulled it up for not complying court’s earlier order to return the money by first week of February. A bench headed by Chief Justice Altamas Kabir, which had earlier extended the deadline to two companies of the group for refunding the money from November end to first week of February, refused to grant more time. “If you have not refunded the amount as per our order then you have no business to come to court,” an angry Chief Justice said adding that it had earlier granted time only to ensure that investors get their money back. Two companies of Sahara group — Sahara India Real Estate Corporation (SIREC) and Sahara Housing Investment Corporation (SHIC) — who along with Sahara chief Subrata Roy are facing contempt proceeding in the apex court before another bench which had on February 6 allowed SEBI to freeze accounts and seize properties of its two companies for defying court orders by not refunding the money to investors. As soon as the matter was taken up for hearing the Supreme Court bar association president M. Krishnamani stood up and objected that the bench headed by the CJI should not hear the case as the order for refunding the amount to investors was passed by another bench. “As a bar leader I have to say keeping with the tradition of this court and this bench should not have heard this matter and the matter should go to the same bench for the modification of the order. Instead of going to hear, the proper recourse would be for the other bench to hear it. I am at pains to hear different types of rumours,” he said. Justice Kabir then got angry and said that he is making statements without knowing anything about the case and asked him to sit. “How do you know what is going to happen in the case. If something happens then you say. Kindly take your seat,” he said. Source: The Asian Age

Read More........ → February 26, 2013

American women win the right to kill and be killed

© Flickr.com/Andrew J Ferguson/cc-by-nc-sa 3.0

According to The Washington Post, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta who is stepping down soon has
decided to lift the ban for servicewomen to take part in hostilities. This year, women will be allowed to serve in the infantry, artillery, tank troops and special detachments. Boris Volkhonsky from the Russian Institute of Strategic Research gives more details. Nevertheless, army commanders retain the right not to allow women to take part in certain operations. In particular, service in such special detachments as the Navy Seals or Delta will so far remain unavailable to women (at least until 2016). Lifting the ban on women’s service in the combat troops of the US armed forces partially took place last year when the Pentagon announced quite a few activities available to women. Still, the most fervent activists were not satisfied with it. They were eager to play even more active roles. In November last year four servicewomen sued the Pentagon insisting on the ban for women to be involved in hostilities to be recognized as unconstitutional. They were supported by The American Civil Liberties Union. The arguments in favour of a full lift of the ban are, for example, that in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan where there is no definite frontline women actually take part in hostilities, so the existing rules should be adapted to life realities. In addition, as one of the plaintiffs pointed out, the ban on taking certain positions was an obstacle in her career and as a result meant sexual – sorry, I mean gender discrimination. However, we are not as much dealing with judicial subtleties here as with another grimace of contemporary western society where such high and noble things as equality, the absence of discrimination, etc., are completely distorted and turned into a farce. The struggle for the equality of women has brought absolutely abnormal results. In their ambition to outdo men in everything women sometimes violate all laws that seem to have been established by nature itself. Having gained the right to kill their own unborn babies, US women demand further expansion of their right to kill. Let’s remember the scandal about tortures and prisoner abuse in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Women were among the cruellest torturers there. At present, women make about 14% in the US 1.4mln-strong armed forces. According to calculations, the lifted ban will open about 230,000 new vacancies. Objections to this decision can hardly be heard among loud approvals. The objections are that the permission for women to serve in small groups in which people are in permanent close contact will give rise to certain psychological, as well as physiological problems. However, after US President Barack Obama allowed open homosexuals to do military service objections about women seem negligible. The founder of the US Center for Military Readiness Elaine Donnelly says that “thirty years of studies, reports and actual experience have shown that in direct ground combat units – the infantry – women do not have an equal opportunity to survive or to help fellow soldiers to survive. The physical aspects of it are only part of the reason.” But this does not confuse women whoinsist on ‘equality’ and US law-makers who support them. Women’s eagerness to hold a rifle and shoot – no matter at whom – overrides all objections. In the 19th century great Russian poet Nikolay Nekrasov wrote in praise of Russian women that they were capable of stopping a horse at full tilt and entering a burning house. Still, the poet believed that women’s main virtue was that they held a baby in their arms and kept a child by the hand. Sadly, today’s feminists seem to have forgotten about women’s primary mission in their trigger-happy mood. Source: Voice of Russia

Read More........ → January 25, 2013

Massive fraud by Dutch psychologist shows weak side of scientific method

The credibility of the field of social psychology is at risk, a Dutch panel  has found  after  reviewing  massive misconduct by a researcher who published dozens of articles based on fraudulent data in 15 years at three universities. Diederik Stapel was a psychologist with a long list of publications and a stellar career. He had an eye for media-friendly research topics – meat eaters are more selfish than vegetarians, for example. But in 2011, whistleblowers alerted authorities at Tilburg University about irregularities in his published papers. His reputation unravelled quickly. Stapel has admitted that he had fiddled his data and fabricated research results and has returned his PhD. In a sombre assessment of the case, three panels chaired by Willem Levelt found fundamental flaws in the scientific process both in the Netherlands and internationally. “Virtually nothing of all the impossibilities, peculiarities and sloppiness mentioned in this report was observed by all these local, national and international members of the field, and no suspicion of fraud whatsoever arose… from the bottom to the top there was a general neglect of fundamental scientific standards and methodological requirements.” They also criticised the editors and reviewers of leading international journals. “Not infrequently reviews were strongly in favour of telling an interesting, elegant, concise and compelling story, possibly at the expense of the necessary scientific diligence.” For social psychologists, the conclusion of the report is damning, almost apocalyptic: “A ‘byproduct’ of the Committees’ inquiries is the conclusion that, far more than was originally assumed, there are certain aspects of the discipline itself that should be deemed undesirable or even incorrect from the perspective of academic standards and scientific integrity.” Predictably, the Executive Committee of the European Association of Social Psychology attacked the report’s conclusions as “slanderous”. This is not just a local disaster, but one which will ripple internationally. “I see a train wreck looming,” wrote Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in an open email to psychologists who work in social priming, one of Stapel’s areas: “your field is now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research”. The journal Perspectives on Psychological Science last month had a special issue on the field’s crisis of confidence. It focused on the key issue of replicability.John P. A. Ioannidis, of Stanford University, points out that the authority of science depends upon its ability to self-correct errors. But as the Levelt report revealed, reproducing the results of other researchers is uncommon. Researchers are far more interested in startling new results which will attract more funding. “The self-correcting paradigm … seems to be very uncommon,” Ioannidis writes. Source: Bioedge

Read More........ → January 17, 2013