The Central government told the Supreme Court on Thursday that the it is proposing to revisit the criteria for determining the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS)[Neil Aurelio Nunes v. Union of India].
Watch complete hearing of court in this video
The submission was made before a three-Judge Bench headed by Justice DY Chandrachud in a plea challenging the 27 per cent reservation for the Other Backward Classes (OBC) and the 10 per cent reservation for the EWS in the all-India Quota (AIQ) seats for postgraduate medical courses.
Solicitor General (SG) Tushar Mehta appearing for the Centre, told the top court that deferring a constitutional amendment should be the last resort but in view of medical admissions, the Centre will take four weeks to revisit the EWS criteria and till then the counselling process for PG medical courses would be deferred.
The Central government will constitute a committee for revisiting the criteria, Mehta said.
The Central government had issued a notice on July 29, 2021 providing 27 percent reservation for OBCs and 10 percent for EWS in 50 percent AIQ seats.
The petitioners before the court are NEET aspirants in postgraduate and undergraduate courses from the unreserved category.
The plea filed through Advocate Subodh S Patil said that the reservation was violative of the 103rd Constitutional Amendment Act, 2018.
The plea stated that when there is no data to show that there is inadequate representation of OBCs and when there is no demand for the same, providing quota for OBC and EWS was "not justified."
The petitioners raised the questions as to whether there should be vertical or horizontal reservations for these seats, and the criteria for the percentage and its income limit.
The SG informed the Court on Thursday that it is taking a call on the income limits to avail the quota, even as the Bench expressed its reservations with the delay in admissions and how the EWS can could be implemented.
The Court eventually listed the matter for further hearing on January 6, 2022.
Winter is the time for warm blankets, bonfires and cosy warmth of home. The days are colder and shorter and everybody looks forward to the exciting weekend fests and afternoon gatherings.The air is cold, flowy and the aura is radiant and vibrant. In this season, however, there are certain things that must be taken care of. One of these primary things includes taking due care of your health and the health and well-being of your loved ones.
To take due care of your health in these winters, there are several steps that you must take.
Healthy Diet: In winter season, there are many types of fresh green vegetables, fruits available in the market. So maintain your health with fresh and clean diet. White meats make you healthy and make your body work in better condition, because meats have more calories that warm your body and protect your body in cold weather.
Drinking Water: This season chilly, winds are blowing continuously and these winds are very dry which makes body lose its moisture. So, it is important to remain hydrated and experts suggest that you must consume at least 8 glass of water per day. It makes your body healthy.
Regular Exercise: Exercise is the most important for health. Regular exercise makes your body fit, supple and helps you stay always active and have a fresh mind. This has a wholesome impact on our overall health and also on bones and muscles. There are lots of benefits of regular exercise that help to protect our body from many types of diseases.
Perfect Amount of Sleep: Having adequate amount of sleep is very important. An average amount of sleep is 6-8 hours in 24hours. It is compulsory for body to take thorough rest to regain its composure and cell-repair. Having insufficient sleep disturbs the natural processes of the body.
Ensure personal hygiene: In this season cold and flu can easily affect your body. In the absence of a proper and hygienic environment, there is a high possibility of you becoming a victim of viral diseases. The winter season is comes with lot of happiness, excitement for planning of holidays with family and so many other things but also this season comes with cold and flu viral illnesses. So protect your body in this season carefully yourself with following these steps in your life.
As soon as he answers the call, we hear birdsong in the background. “You know, we rarely hear that here, in the city. Looking out the window we mostly see cars and skyscrapers,” we confess, perhaps slightly envious that Patrick Kilonzo Mwalua is spending lockdown immersed in nature. “I love this place,” he tells us. In the pictures he sends us on WhatsApp, fluffy clouds dot the blue sky and the meadow is filled with white flowers. It feels like we can almost smell their delicate scent. There isn’t a building in sight. A little girl, barefoot in the sand, plays with some goats.
To many, Mwalua is a hero. When we point this out to him, he bursts out in sincere and melodious laughter. It seems like fame hasn’t changed him at all: he’s driven by his love for animals and for his land, a remote region of Kenya located about fifty kilometres from Tsavo National Park. It all started in November 2016, when Mwalua decided to rent a truck, get behind the wheel and drive for hours, multiple times a week, to bring water to the animals in the park, whose survival was being threatened by a terrible drought. Ever since, he has made a name for himself as the “water man“. Buffalos and zebras know they can count on him. And now that his first project has taken off thanks to the contribution of those who believed in its potential, Mwalua wants to launch a new one. Something as simple as it is brilliant, that could contribute to safeguarding elephants, bees and communities: cultivating sunflowers.
The idea of having “survival skills” means different things to different people. For those living in teeming metropolises such as Hong Kong, this involves an ability to navigate jam-packed streets, keep your sanity and secure a seat on the train before someone else grabs it.
Then there are the “primitive living” survivalists. These people – usually men – leave the comforts and annoyances of civilisation for days or weeks on end to play at surviving in the wild on their wits alone.
Real purists take nothing from civilisation with them. Instead, they make their own tools and weapons for hunting from wood, bamboo and stone. They build their own dwellings from whatever materials are at hand. And they’ll eat anything they can stomach.
The most famous YouTube survivalist is Australian John Plant, who in his videos is a Robinson Crusoe-type character: he’s a loner, wears only a tatty pair of shorts, and never says a word. His Primitive Technology channel has more than 8.5 million followers and almost 54 million views on just one of his 39 current videos (about how to make a tiled roof hut in the bush).
In his other videos, Plant shows viewers how to build a round hut from wood and thatch, how to grow and cook yam, and how to make a pair of sandals from lawyer cane, a local climbing palm.
However, Plant had better watch out – the trend has caught on in Southeast Asia and he now has serious competition from several groups of survivalists who are also making waves on YouTube.
On January 26, 2008, a 30-year-old part-time entrepreneur named Mike Merrill decided to sell himself on the open market. He divided himself into 100,000 shares and set an initial public offering price of $1 a share. Each share would earn a potential return on profits he made outside of his day job as a customer service rep at a small Portland, Oregon, software company. Over the next 10 days, 12 of his friends and acquaintances bought 929 shares, and Merrill ended up with a handful of extra cash. He kept the remaining 99.1 percent of himself but promised that his shares would be nonvoting: He’d let his new stockholders decide what he should do with his life.
Every year, tech-industry entrepreneurs make a similar decision. Taking on investors is usually one of the first steps in Silicon Valley’s well-established path to outrageous fortune. Merrill wasn’t running a startup per se, but he had plenty of great ideas and ambitions—videogames he wanted to develop, a data backup service he wanted to launch, a whiskey-tasting society he hoped to form. He needed venture capital, but as an ordinary guy, he had limited access to capital markets. That didn’t hold him back. He simply relied on the support of the motley group of programmers, bloggers, and baristas he knew in Portland. It was Silicon Valley–style finance, writ small.
But, like many entrepreneurs before him, Merrill soon learned the downside to taking on outside funding. In the ensuing months and years, 128 people bought shares of Merrill, and he fell victim to competing shareholder interests, stock price manipulation, and investors looking for short-term gains at the expense of his long-term well-being. He was overwhelmed by paperwork and blindsided by takeover interest. He found himself beholden to his shareholders in ways he had never imagined, ruining personal relationships along the way. Through it all, Merrill clung stubbornly to the belief that since an IPO had worked for Google and Amazon, it should work for an individual too.
He isn’t alone in this theory. Upstart.com, a company founded last year by Google exec David Girouard, offers a bit of capital in exchange for a cut of a college graduate’s future earnings. Other startups, like Pave and Thrust Fund, solicit investments in entrepreneurs for a return on their future ventures. (And of course David Bowie, European soccer players, and a minor-league baseball player have all sold shares of their earnings.)
But Merrill has taken it further. He felt that more people would invest in him if they knew they were going to have a say over which projects he pursued. To enable this oversight, he paid a developer 500 shares and $500 to build a website that allowed shareholders to vote on his priorities and projects. The developer also coded a trading platform so Merrill’s stock could be bought and sold after the IPO. Anybody could now get a piece of him; you just had to click a Buy button on KmikeyM.com (the site is an abbreviation of Merrill’s full name: Kenneth Michael Merrill).
Initially, shareholders voted on a variety of small projects. On February 15, 2008, for example, Merrill asked whether he should make a short video to market shares in himself. His investors voted that idea down, but a month later they approved an investment of $79.63 in a Rwandan chicken farmer.
“I figured they’d make good decisions for me, since they had money on the line and wanted to see their investment appreciate.”
The corporate oversight got more complicated in August 2008, when Merrill moved in with shareholder number seven: his girlfriend, Willow McCormick. Though they’d been dating for two and a half years and generally got along great, it wasn’t an easy decision for Merrill. McCormick taught grade school, and her idea of fun was playing Boggle at night with her friends. Merrill couldn’t stand Boggle. He was more interested in things like planning the whiskey-drinking group with his buddies. “His ideal relationship was one in which we lived harmoniously independent lives, and I think mine was a little more traditional,” McCormick says.
Steve Schroeder, one of Merrill’s oldest friends, was upset that he hadn’t been consulted about the move-in. He may not have put much money in—just $139 for 66 shares—but that still gave him 4.8 percent of the voting stock. McCormick had only 19 shares, so technically Schroeder’s opinion should have carried approximately three times as much weight. If Merrill was now going to spend more time at home with his girlfriend, he would have less time to pursue activities that were priorities to shareholders with larger stakes.
Merrill hadn’t intended to give shareholders control over his private life, but he realized that Schroeder had a point. “I figured they’d make good decisions for me, since they had money on the line and wanted to see their investment appreciate,” Merrill says.
McCormick didn’t see it that way. Merrill started spending more time with Schroeder and his other shareholder friends, who jointly controlled a large block of stock. To McCormick, it seemed like a corporate takeover of her boyfriend and gave new resonance to the famous book about corporate buyouts, Barbarians at the Gate. “There were a couple of friends I did have some issues with, and they had a big say in how Mike spent his time,” McCormick says. But when she tried to talk to Merrill about it, he would offer what he said was a simple solution: “Buy more shares.”
McCormick seethed. “I didn’t want to play into it,” she says. “I felt like my status as a girlfriend earned me his ear, like the way a first lady has the president’s ear.”
When they started dating, McCormick and Merrill had a series of conversations about whether Merrill should get a vasectomy. At first they agreed that it was a good idea; neither thought they wanted kids. But now that she was a little older, McCormick wasn’t so sure. “I started to have stirrings,” she says. “I was feeling less certain.”
Then, on August 10, 2008, Merrill asked the shareholders to decide whether he should get a vasectomy. He didn’t tell McCormick that he was going to bring them in on it. As the CEO of himself, he simply wrote a note to his shareholders explaining his position on the subject. “Children are a financial drain,” Merrill wrote. “The time investment of raising a child is immense. The responsibility is epic. The impact on future projects would be drastic. In light of these factors, it makes sense to reduce the chances to nearly zero and have a vasectomy performed.”
McCormick was furious and embarrassed. “He made our personal life public without consulting me,” she says. It got worse when the ballots came in. Schroeder voted yes. Josh Berezin, a grade-school friend and political consultant, voted yes. To McCormick, it wasn’t just a referendum on the vasectomy. It was also a referendum on whether Merrill’s friends thought he should have kids with her. It was, she says, “a judgment on me.”
It wouldn’t be the first time that outside investors tore apart a close relationship among a company’s principals. For recent examples, look no further than Eduardo Saverin, Mark Zuckerberg’s onetime pal who was pushed out of the company he helped found. And like Saverin, McCormick decided to fight back.
Farm laws news Highlights:Prime MinisterNarendra ModiFriday announced that his governmentwould repeal the three farm lawspassed by Parliament a year ago, which has led to massive protests by farmers unions in several states. The procedure to roll back the laws would take place during the winter session of Parliament, which begins next week, the Prime Minister informed.
In an address to the nation on Guru Nanak Jayanti, PM Modi said, “We worked to provide farmers with seeds at reasonable rates and facilities like micro-irrigation, 22 crore soil health cards. Such factors have contributed to increased agricultural production. However, we failed to make them understand about the benefits of the new laws and as such, we have decided to roll them back.”
Farmers from Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and other states have been camping at Delhi’s borders since November 2020 in protest against the three legislations, the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020, Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020, and Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020. The protests have continued for over a year as deliberations between the government and farmers unions failed.
Plenty of countries have added creative elements to their flags, whether it's in the form of a dragon, a machete, or atwo-headed eagle. But a design you likely won’t find no matter where you are on Earth is one that includes purple. It’s not because the color is considered universally unfashionable: Its absence from flags has more to do with practicality.
In this video, the educational YouTube page After Skool breaks down the history of the glamorous hue. The first purple dyes were almost entirely sourced from one species of sea snail harvested from a small part of the Mediterranean. It took 10,000 of these snails to produce just a single gram of dye. For this reason, purple was worth more than its weight in gold prior to the 19th century.
While purple garments did exist, they were mainly worn by the supremely wealthy and members of the royal family (hence the term “royal purple”). Though it would have made a bold statement, incorporating purple into flags just wasn’t worth the cost.
The color’s status was forever changed in 1856, when a British university student named William Henry Perkin discovered a way to make purple dye synthetically. It became much more accessible in the years that followed, which is why the handful of flags that do have a splash of purple were all designed after 1900.
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