E D I T O R I A L   P A G E

EDITORIALS

Sonia is willing!
IN quite a spectacular departure from the posture that the Congress had been striking till now, party President Sonia Gandhi has declared that it is now open to coalition offers if these help it to come to power in states as well as at the Centre. Had this U-turn come at a time when the party was desperate for the ruling status in states, it could have been interpreted as a sign of desperation. 

Neglect of the border belt
THE residents of the border districts in Punjab, Rajasthan and Jammu and Kashmir face some peculiar problems. Both agriculturally and industrially, they have lagged behind in development. The governments in all three states have made little efforts to improve their scio-economic lot. There are many factors responsible for the comparatively high level of backwardness in the border areas.

OPINION

Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes
Why deny the same right to India?
R. S. Bedi
SEPTEMBER 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington have led the USA to review its security policies. It plans to carry out pre-emptive strikes with a view to neutralising threats “before they are fully formed”. President Bush has recently unfolded the new National Security Doctrine before Congress. It aims at stopping the adversaries from challenging the US military superiority by adopting strike first policy.

MIDDLE

Of three cheats
R.S.Dutta
THERE is hardly anyone who has not been cheated at least once or who has not cheated others once in one’s life time. Then there are those who earn their living by cheating others. They are caught sooner or later, in spite of their skill and experience, and are convicted.

POINT OF LAW

PPSC case: a “chilling” message for judicial accountability
Anupam Gupta
“WE would have been lynched by the people on the streets had we accepted the offer,” Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer told me in 1993, while on a visit to Chandigarh late that year, referring to a government proposal to exempt Judges from income tax made during his tenure as a Judge of the Supreme Court.

TRENDS & POINTERS

Snoring linked to learning problems
SNORING in children always is a sign of a medical problem and a marker for learning problems, researchers have reported. A study of Tucson-area elementary students indicates that children who are “loud snorers” are twice as likely to have learning problems as children who do not snore. 

• Learning possible even for the aged

• Executives turning fitness freaks
  

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

EDITORIALS

Sonia is willing!

IN quite a spectacular departure from the posture that the Congress had been striking till now, party President Sonia Gandhi has declared that it is now open to coalition offers if these help it to come to power in states as well as at the Centre. Had this U-turn come at a time when the party was desperate for the ruling status in states, it could have been interpreted as a sign of desperation. But coming as it does at this stage when the Congress rules almost all the major states, it has to be seen in the backdrop of the next Lok Sabha elections. In good measure, Mrs Sonia Gandhi has thrown broad -enough hints that she will be a claimant to the Prime Minister’s post. It has been left to her assistants to underline the point that despite the precedent set in Jammu and Kashmir, the top post at the Centre is not up for negotiations, although anything short of that will presumably be a matter of give and take. All that pre-supposes that the Congress will be a predominant party and will be able to dictate terms to its likely partners. Interestingly, while the BJP has announced that it will form a coalition government even if it had the numerical strength to do so on its own, the Congress only says that its first priority will be to form a government on its own steam, but would consider sharing power if that were inevitable.

As things stand today, it will be rather presumptuous of the Congress to think of toting up the right numbers all by itself. It will in all probability need a lot many people from outside to pull it along. While the Sonia turn-around may mean more competition for the BJP, it is not going to make things any easier for the Congress as such. The experience of the BJP regarding the coalition dharma has been bitterer than neem and karela put together. In fact, it perhaps holds a record of the compromises that it has had to make to stay in power - almost on a daily basis. The Congress can assure itself of similar trials and tribulations if at all it enters the coalition sweepstakes. Rather, it may be in hotter water overall. The BJP at least had a consummate politician like Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee at the helm. And yet, he has all but raised his hands in desperation. Now whatever other qualities Mrs Sonia Gandhi may claim to have, she is not exactly a seasoned politician. The Congress under her will have to face the full blast of the avarice of small-time politicians as and when it invites them to join the bandwagon. In any case, there is no dearth of ambitious men in the Congress itself who would come into their own once they taste power.

Neglect of the border belt

THE residents of the border districts in Punjab, Rajasthan and Jammu and Kashmir face some peculiar problems. Both agriculturally and industrially, they have lagged behind in development. The governments in all three states have made little efforts to improve their scio-economic lot. There are many factors responsible for the comparatively high level of backwardness in the border areas. Whenever there is an increased threat of war with Pakistan, residents are forced to shift their belongings to safer places, incurring transport charges and experiencing physical psychological dislocation. When the troops were moved to the border areas earlier this year, landmines were put up in the fields. The farmers not only lost their crops, but were denied access to the sensitive area. Many were evicted from their homes also. Some lost their own limbs and cattle in the accidental triggering of landmines. The recent withdrawal of the armed forces from the border belt has not come as relief to many unfortunate ones who had to celebrate the last Divali in rented houses in nearby towns. They are still denied access to their homes and fields which are in the landmined area. The saddest part of the story is that despite making such sacrifices for the security of the country, they have not been paid the promised compensation. There is hardly any long-term plan for their betterment.

There is no leader of vision sympathetic to their plight even to promise them a better future. Bereft of the basic amenities for survival like clean drinking water and healthcare, the residents uncomplainingly carry on with their day-to-day drudgery. Inconvenience apart, education of the children of uprooted families is a major casuality. Already, what goes on in the name of education in these areas has to be seen to be believed. The high level of illiteracy and lack of opportunities for growth keep these families perpetually in poverty. Being at the tail-end, villages along the border do not get sufficient canal water and power supply. Forced by poverty, youths take to petty crime or migrate to nearby towns in search of employment. Youth must be given vocational training and facilities for self-employment. Discontent among the youth in the border belt can be exploited by anti-national forces. The plight of industry in the border districts of Punjab is also going from bad to worse. Those doing business with traders in Pakistan have suffered with the stoppage of the train services between the two countries. Both the state and the central governments need to give a special package to promote agriculture and industry in the border belt . The industry can be revived by giving easier bank loans, rebate in power charges and freight subsidy. New units can be encouraged with incentives like land at subsidised rates, exemption from octroi and central excise duty. The continuous neglect of the border districts can have dangerous consequences. We have seen it not long ago.

OPINION

Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes
Why deny the same right to India?
R. S. Bedi

SEPTEMBER 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington have led the USA to review its security policies. It plans to carry out pre-emptive strikes with a view to neutralising threats “before they are fully formed”. President Bush has recently unfolded the new National Security Doctrine before Congress. It aims at stopping the adversaries from challenging the US military superiority by adopting strike first policy.

“Given the goals of rogue states and the terrorists, the US can no longer solely rely on reactive posture as we have in the past. We cannot let our enemy strike first”, says the controversial policy. The USA is even willing to go all alone without the support of its allies or the sanction of the UN if necessary. The policy reflects a major strategic shift from military deterrence to pre-emption.

Current shift from hard-to-achieve objectives against the Al-Qaida in Afghanistan to Saddam Hussein in Iraq is in keeping with this very strategy. Despite the reservations expressed by Russia, France and Germany, the US resolve to go ahead with whatever support is available has not been affected. It’s becoming increasingly impatient with the wranglings of the UN. The USA is eager to assert its global superiority by neutralising potential adversaries from rising against it.

The rationale of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive strikes ironically does not apply to others in similar situations. Both India and Russia have been suffering at the hands of the terrorists in Kashmir and Chechenya. The USA has been singularly responsible for preventing India from military action across the border with Pakistan ever since December, 2001, when the Pak terrorists struck at India’s very seat of power and the symbol of democracy. The process had continued unabated eversince. Strikes at Kaluchak killing innocent men, women and children of soldiers deployed on the border and the recent carnage at Swaminarain temple at Gandhinagar only highlight Pak’s intransigence. The fact that India has been the victim of Pak sponsored terrorism for the last 13 years is not sufficient enough to let India retaliate in self-defence. India had to finally withdraw its troops after a 10-month-long nerve-wrecking deployment along the IB/LOC.

If ‘the right to resort to pre-emptive or preventive strikes is inherent in the sovereignty of a nation to protect itself”, as Gen Powell said the other day before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington, the USA has no moral right to deny the same to others beyond a point. Retaliation is recognised by international law as part of the sovereign right of a nation to self-defence. But the USA while asserting its right to pre-empt any threat to its security, ironically expects others not even to retaliate in self-defence. Any time India talked of reaching the end of its patience, there was a spontaneous pressure from the USA to avoid military action.

It needs to be emphasised that the US doctrine of pre-emption is against all international law and behaviour. The USA seem to go back to the days of “Gunboat” diplomacy when the British naval ships used to steam up the Yangtse river in order to extract concession from the Chinese Government. No wonder, the British are the only ones backing the same policy now being propounded by the sole super power in the 21st century.

US nagging emphasis for dialogue with Pakistan despite continuing cross-border terrorism is apparently based on its perception of likely nuclear exchange between the two neighbours. Pakistan’s “first use” option in the event of grave threat to its integrity from India and latters’ “punitive second strike” response, in US view makes South Asia one of the most fragile regions. The USA has apparently fallen victim to Pak’s nuclear blackmail and has unwittingly given credence to its deterrence. Pakistan surely knows that it would commit harakiri if it ever takes the risk of going nuclear, whatever be the nature of threat from India.

Pakistan has somehow convinced itself that it has been able to inhibit India because of its nuclear capability. The conventional military balance in its perception is not so important as the ability to conduct a proxy war and the threat to escalate to nuclear proportions.

The danger in Indo-Pak context, therefore, lies in the continued proxy war of the type Pakistan has imposed upon India since 1989. In April, 1999, when Musharraf’s men were infiltrating the Kargil heights across the LoC, he said that while the conventional and the nuclear wars were unlikely, the probability of proxy wars was on the rise. Pakistan has begun to feel that the conventional forces would no more determine the probability of war occurrence.

However, Pakistan has to understand that its so called sense of security arising out of its nuclear option and the emphasis on proxy war is somewhat misplaced. A progressively increasing view in India is that there is an adequate space available for punitive offensive action between a conventional war and nuclear response. The Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Krishnaswamy, while addressing the media on the 70th anniversary of the Indian Air Force the other day said that the IAF had the capability to strike across the LoC if the need arose. He said that the escalation could be contained by prior “risk analysis”. “There are different points of sensitivity along the LoC. Like the use of the artillery, we can use the air power if there is need”, he went on to add. He further stated that the IAF was ready to support the army operations.

Pakistan’s very intransigence in pursuing its vicious terrorism driven by religious extremists and the US inability to prevail over it to end all this justifiably entitles India to retaliate in self-defence. However, India need not be unnecessarily submissive to the USA just because opposition to its views or action may adversely affect friendship with it. By now it is amply clear that the Pakistan factor will not permit the USA to go along with India in fighting terrorism being sponsored by its very ally, not at least till Al-Qaida is sorted out. Sooner India reconciles to the fact that Pakistan is US “necessary ally” in its war against Al-Qaida, the better it is. India has to call an end to Pak’s intransigence in hurting India all by itself.

If India needs America because of its technology, the USA too needs India for various strategic considerations. President Bush spoke of “long term partnership” to Prime Minister Vajpayee during latter’s visit to the USA on September 10. In US perceptions India is a growing power with which development of strategic relations is in US interests. It needs India for trade and commerce, to protect its shipping in the vital sea lanes of the Indian Ocean, to fight terrorism and, most importantly, to countervail China. Despite substantial differences on vital issues like the NPT, CTBT and the missile and space programmes, the USA has “undertaken a transformation in its bilateral relations with India based on the conviction that the US interests require strong relationship with India.”

There has been a flurry of visits in September from both sides to cement this strategic relationship. Rumsfeld even gave a guard of honour to our Foreign Minister, a gesture normally reserved for the Heads of States. The two have also embarked upon cooperation between their armies, navies and the airforces in a big way. Recent para exercises at Agra, just finished naval exercise along the Malabar coast and the army, air force exercises in Alaska are only a precursor of things to come ahead. No doubt, such exposures will help Indian armed forces to learn new concepts and modern techniques of warfare, but they will also get exposed to a different value system and vastly affluent way of life prevalent in US armed forces. Pak armed forces continue to remain beholden to the Pentagon even today when the rest of the country has developed a marked aversion towards the Americans.

India must move judiciously without rushing hurriedly in US lap. The USA will not hesitate to pressurise India when the issue of non-proliferation comes up in the near future. It will continue to put obstacles in India’s way to prevent it from developing its missile and space capabilities, both being perceived as long term threat to its national security and commercial interests. It wants India to cap its nuclear and missile capabilities and halt production of nuclear material for military purposes. The curx of the matter is that the USA does not want India to develop capabilities that would threaten it in the future. It will pursue its national objectives unmindful of what impact these have on India’s future. Remember, the Americans are known to dump their allies without much ado. Only time will tell.

Air Marshal Bedi is former Director General, Defence Planning Staff, Ministry of Defence.

MIDDLE

Of three cheats
R.S.Dutta

THERE is hardly anyone who has not been cheated at least once or who has not cheated others once in one’s life time. Then there are those who earn their living by cheating others. They are caught sooner or later, in spite of their skill and experience, and are convicted. During their incarceration, they exchange their experiences with their fellow cheat convicts and their imprisonment rather than reforming them, when they are released after serving their term of imprisonment, most of them revert to their old profession and prove better cheats. However, in this piece, I will dwell upon cases of three cheats, who had tried to cheat only once perhaps and were caught.

The first case is that of a man who produced fake age certificate in the country’s top competition, the second of a person who had produced a bogus degree for entering service and the third one of a man who loved a boy who lived in his neighbourhood. All names have been changed for obvious reasons.

During the days of the Raj, of all the All-India Services, or the Secretary of State Services as these were commonly called, such as Indian Civil Services (ICS), Indian Service of Engineers (ISE), Indian Police (IP), Indian Education Service (IES), the first one was considered the most prestigious, because of the power and authority its officers had. Gurnam Singh (it’s a changed name) was first class MA in English literature and a brilliant young man. He sat in the ICS competition and his name was in the merit list of successful candidates. But, before he was sent up for training, somebody complained that he had falsified his age. As of now, some of the unsuccessful candidates are on the lookout if any of the successful candidates had produced false certificate of his date of birth, qualification etc, as they stand a chance if any of the successful candidates drops for a wrong certificate.

Enquiry made by the authorities proved that he was overage and manipulated his date of birth certificate. He was prosecuted and sentenced to a certain term in jail. He was sent to a jail in what was called Angrezi Illaqa (British India). He was the subject of former Patiala State and on this ground he sought his transfer to a State jail, which worked to his advantage, as the future events showed.

Now, when any dignitary like the Viceroy or the Agent to the Governor-General of a certain State or States (later redesignated as Resident) paid an official visit to the State, his itinerary invariably included a visit to the Central Jail, Patiala, which was considered one of the top jails in Punjab, from security point of view and the goods produced in the jail manufactory. It was customary that the Maharaja accompanied the VIP wherever he went. On one such occasion, Gurnam Singh managed to meet the ruler and begged for the remission of his remaining sentence. Magnanimous as Maharaja Bhupendra Singh was, he readily acceded to Gurnam Singh’s request. His Highness was so much impressed by the fluent English and personality of Gurnam Singh that he ordered his appointment as a lecturer in Mahendra College.

Pundit Ram Kishan was a Sanskrit teacher in the State’s premier high school, named City High School. He was taken in service on the basis of a Shastri’s degree. Indeed, he was very well up in Sanskrit, so much so that once a debate in Sanskrit was held in the local Arya Samaj Mandir in which many Sanskrit scholars participated. Ram Kishan was declared the best speaker.

He had only a little time left to retire when somebody made a complaint to the Director of Public Instruction that he had produced a false degree while entering service. Ram Kishan was clever enough to have produced Shastri’s degree from a university which was far away. Enquiry made from the university concerned proved that his degree was bogus. Taking a lenient view of the case because of long service of the man and his nearing date of retirement, he was just dismissed from service rather than being tried criminally.

The third and last case had no such element of personal gain. Pundit Karam Chand was Inspector of Police. He was known to have a younger brother, Sham Lal, whom he had brought up, gave him best education up to BA and got him enlisted as Sub-Inspector of Police. The Inspector had Sham Lal married in a very well-to-do Brahmin family. One day, the Prime Minister received an anonymous complaint that Sham Lal was not the real brother of the Inspector but the son of such and such Nat (a small community which earned its livelihood by acrobatic feats like walking on stilts, rope-walk etc) which lived in the neighbourhood of the Inspector in his native village. The P.M. marked the complaint to the I.G. Police for report. After sometime, it was received back with the Inspector’s confession that Sham Lal was not his real brother but he had treated him as such from his childhood. Here the P.M. took a much more lenient view and simply ordered that the Inspector should be debarred from any future promotion.

POINT OF LAW

PPSC case: a “chilling” message for judicial accountability
Anupam Gupta

“WE would have been lynched by the people on the streets had we accepted the offer,” Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer told me in 1993, while on a visit to Chandigarh late that year, referring to a government proposal to exempt Judges from income tax made during his tenure as a Judge of the Supreme Court.

The proposal, he told me, was considered by a full court of the Supreme Court — a meeting of all the Judges on the administrative side — and rejected out of hand.

That was the Supreme Court of India during Krishna Iyer’s time, over two decades ago, a court so acutely conscious of being, despite all its power, craftsmanship and activism, a servant of the people in the widest sense of the expression and anxious not to betray the slightest sign of hankering after privileges of any kind.

It is a different higher judiciary that presides over the administration of justice in India today, a judiciary that does not allow itself to be deluded by false Gandhian notions of simplicity and self-denial and gladly combines an expansiveness in the exercise of judicial power with a search for expansion of judicial privileges.

Including exemption from income tax.

“A closed-door conference of Chief Justices of High Courts across the country, chaired by Chief Justice of India B.N. Kirpal,” reported The Sunday Express on November 3 in a front-page story, “met in the capital over three days and resolved to ask the Centre for several tax breaks for themselves.”

Captioned “Their Lordships don’t like paying income tax,” the story — the first public disclosure of the resolution adopted at the Chief Justices’ Conference-2002, held from September 13 to 15 — added:

“And, in what flies in the face of a Supreme Court ruling on the subject, they set up a special committee of judges to study their controversial proposal of making their salaries tax free.”

The proposal which Krishna Iyer, one of the greatest Indian judges of all time and one of the very few who have remained independent even after retirement, refusing to accept any post-retiral assignment, considered so inequitable as to provoke the prospect of public lynching of judges.

A body wholly outside the Constitution, the Chief Justices’ Conference has no legal sanctity or sanction whatsoever except perhaps as a trade union of the judiciary headed by the Chief Justice of India. Any attempt on anyone’s part, including the judiciary itself, to treat its resolutions as if they were decisions of the Supreme Court, constituting the law of the land and binding on all courts under Article 141 of the Constitution, must evoke serious objection.

That besides, whether it is exemption from income tax or any other matter, all the distinguished members of the judicial fraternity who attend such conferences and subscribe to the resolutions passed therein, including the highest of them, the Chief Justice of India, are answerable to the nation for what they do or fail to do thereat, the secrecy of their proceedings notwithstanding.

Why, indeed, should judges who swear by transparency in court throw a veil of secrecy over their deliberations when meeting out of court — I am speaking here not of “full court” meetings which are a part of judicial administration, but of meetings held out of court which impinge nonetheless on the administration of justice — is an issue which must surely be examined one day on first principles.

It is on the first principles of judicial transparency, ethics and accountability that I am compelled to return to a subject that has occupied this column more than once before: the involvement of the judiciary in the Punjab Public Service Commission (PPSC) scam and the inquiry conducted by the former Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Justice Arun B. Saharya.

There is no doubt by now that Justice Saharya was badly let down by the Chief Justice of India — I beg your pardon, the former Chief Justice of India — Justice B.N. Kirpal over his probe into the PPSC scam and that, though the probe was initiated by Justice Saharya at the asking of the CJI himself, Justice Kirpal’s priorities had clearly changed by the time Justice Saharya submitted his report to him on August 26.

There is no doubt either that Justice Kirpal had gone through Justice Saharya’s report before the latter retired in mid-September, a fact on which the reader can take my word even though it would be imprudent to divulge any details.

It was not due to any lack of time, then, that Justice Kirpal sat over Justice Saharya’s report all this while, maintaining right upto his last day in office (November 7) a posture of deafening silence on the subject that does no credit to him or to his reputation as head of India’s judicial system.

I speak more in anguish than anger — though, given the gravity of Justice Saharya’s findings, anger would be no less justified than anguish — for the “primacy” that attaches, by judge-made law, to the office of the Chief Justice of India is a primacy not only of power but of responsibility as well.

Justice Kirpal’s witting, if not wilful, failure to discharge his responsibility in the PPSC scam, a scam that has no parallel in the history of independent India, carries a “chilling” message for judicial accountability in the country, if I may be permitted to adapt American judge, Irving Kaufman’s warning, over two decades ago, against “chilling judicial independence” by applying inhouse sanctions other than impeachment.

Described by President Jefferson as a “bungling way of removing judges”, an “impracticable thing — a mere scarecrow”, and by Viscount Bryce as the “heaviest piece of artillery in the (parliamentary) arsenal”, “so heavy” indeed that “it is unfit for ordinary use”, impeachment has, all across the common law world, long since ceased to inspire public confidence as an instrument of judicial accountability.

Academic criticism as well of the “inadequacy of impeachment” and discussion of alternative measures for removal of judges, “demanded today by strong considerations of public need” (as he put it), goes back to 1930 and the publication that year of Michigan professor Burke Shartel’s seminal, scholarly, three-part essay on appointment, supervision and removal of federal judges.

“Rarely is it given to a man to brush the accumulated dust of generations from the Constitution and to perceive afresh its rational design,” wrote Raoul Berger forty-three years later in 1973, in his book on impeachment — perhaps the only work of its kind till date — brought out by Harvard University Press. “Such a man was Burke Shartel, who first saw the claim for exclusivity of impeachment in all its nakedness....”

Almost on the heels of Berger’s work came Shimon Shetreet’s pioneering and extensively researched treatise “Judges on Trial: A Study of the Appointment and Accountability of the English Judiciary” (1976), with a foreword by Lord Justice Scarman complimenting the author, on the Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for a thoroughness and a detached impartiality “to which no English writer could aspire on this topic”.

“It is extremely unlikely,” wrote Shetreet, in an interesting section on suspension of members of the higher judiciary not without relevance to what happened nearer home in the PPSC case, “that an English judge who was suspended from exercising his judicial functions by administrative arrangements would challenge the constitutionality of such arrangements in judicial proceedings.”

If a judge so suspended, he said, tried to obtain a judicial remedy, “it seems most doubtful whether his attempt would be crowned with success. In the first place, there is some doubt as to the form of procedure open to the judge for challenging the withdrawal of work from him. But even if the question is properly before a court of law, it is not at all clear whether the judge has any judicial remedy in this particular situation.”

More than any academic analysis, however, it was the frustrating, fruitless experience of impeachment in Justice V. Ramaswami’s case in the early 1990s, and the political double standards which accompanied it, that convinced the Supreme Court of the necessity to go beyond impeachment — to bypass impeachment, if you like — and to evolve, afresh on first principles, an “inhouse procedure” of inquiry and action against Judges who fail to measure upto the highest standards of rectitude and conduct expected of the judiciary.

“Guarantee of tenure and its protection by the Constitution,” ruled the Supreme Court in 1995 in Justice A.M. Bhattacharjee’s case, laying down such a procedure, “would not...accord sanctuary for corruption or grave misbehaviour.... The bad behaviour of one Judge has a rippling effect on the reputation of the judiciary as a whole. When the edifice of judiciary is built heavily on public confidence and respect, the damage by an obstinate Judge would rip apart the entire judicial structure built in the Constitution.”

An outstanding illustration of the inhouse procedure enunciated by the Supreme Court in Justice Bhattacharjee’s case, the Saharya report reveals not one but three such Judges, whose obstinacy in denying facts during the course of the inquiry is matched only by their utterly graceless persistence in office after it.

TRENDS & POINTERS

Snoring linked to learning problems

SNORING in children always is a sign of a medical problem and a marker for learning problems, researchers have reported.

A study of Tucson-area elementary students indicates that children who are “loud snorers” are twice as likely to have learning problems as children who do not snore. The study was presented at CHEST 2002, the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians.

James Goodwin, a sleep researcher at the University of Arizona, Tucson, said snoring — possibly caused by less than restful sleep — always is an abnormal event in children. He said it can indicate such problems as enlarged tonsils or an enlarged tongue. Moreover, children who snore also are likely to have a condition called obstructive sleep apnea, meaning they stop breathing for brief periods while sleeping. UPI

Learning possible even for the aged

Challenging views that age reduces one’s ability to adapt to new situations, a study reveals that old owls are able to learn new tricks, implying brains of older animals including humans may be capable of changes.

An old owl can be taught new tricks, if training is given in small steps, a report in the journal “Nature” says. Owls are nocturnal hunters who rely on auditory as well as visual information to track their prey. Coordinated maps of auditory and visual space are formed in the brain which help owls to track their targets, the report says.

“...these experiments offer hope to those of us who aren’t getting any younger that improving learning ability just means finding new strategies for inducing plasticity in our brains,” the report says. PTI

Executives turning fitness freaks

Asian executives have revised their priorities since the September 11 terrorist attacks, with many skipping boring investment seminars in favour of spending more time with their families and getting fit, according to a survey. Money was knocked off the top spot in the lives of Asian business people, with executives more interested in getting their stomachs a little flatter, the survey conducted by the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review has found.

Malaysians were the most enthusiastic about becoming healthier, with three out of four polled having decided to adopt healthy habits while 47 per cent had set physical fitness as a 12 month goal.

However, the idea of pumping iron did not appeal to South Koreans, Japanese or Indonesians who maintained their top concern was to bulk up business profits rather than their biceps. AFP

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

Charity is beloved and acceptable before God, and is accounted the chief among all good deeds... Blessed is he who prefers his brother before himself.

***

— The Talmud