MPs don�t consider themselves answerable to people: LHC CJ

LAHORE: Lahore High Court Chief Justice Sheikh Azmat Saeed said on Friday that the elected representatives did not consider themselves answerable to the people because they had failed to change the mindset inherited from the British rule wherein elected representatives were only accountable to the executive.

He stated that the state and its institutions should command respect and loyalty of its people for their survival and exist to serve the people and preserve their rights and interests. He was addressing the opening day of a two-day conference ñ “Testing Times: reflections on Present and Future” ñ organized by the Institute of Chartered Accountants for Pakistan (ICAP) on its golden jubilee here at a local hotel.

ICAP president Rashid Rahman Mir, Clive Parritt-FCA, president Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, Hafiz Mohammad Yousaf and a large number of ICAP students and its ex-representatives were also present. The golden jubilee celebrations will continue on Saturday (today).

The LHC chief justice said one pillar of the state had realized its true role but the other organs of the state were finding it difficult to keep up. Perhaps, he added, they were not prepared to give up their privileges and shed old habits.

He said the mess we saw was the dust raised by the winds of change and what we all had to do was to be on the right side of the history. The CJ said the most significant feature of the moment was that people of Pakistan had realized that the state and systems existed for their benefit and the people were now asserting the right of ownership on them.

After decades of passive fatalistic acceptance of institutionalized injustice, he said, the people of Pakistan were threatening to challenge all the entrenched norms both inside the courts and upon the streets, terming it ferocious to cloud the issues through meaningless rhetoric and resurrection of non-issues ferocious.

He said that every effort was being made by vested interest to avoid answering the question raised, terming the times Pakistan was passing through testing, he added.

He said that the present day judicial system was transplanted in South Asia from across the seas by the British and while it catered for an effective and efficient resolution of disputes between the natives it did not offer much protection to citizens against the legislative and executive powers of the state, as the inhabitants, in fact, were not citizens but subjects. He said that the power to strike down legislative instruments or set aside executive action in violation of fundamental rights was kept at its barest minimum. He termed it unfortunate that, even after independence, the mindsets of the judiciary had not changed and decision after decision were handed out validating illegitimate actions at the expense of the people of Pakistan.

The LHC CJ said the sorry state of affairs continued for almost six decades at a very high cost. He said that judiciary had found itself unable or unwilling to protect the rights of the people again and again. However, slowly, through constant soul searching and generational shift, the realization set in that all organs of the state, especially the judiciary, existed for the benefit of the people who were the true and the real owners of the legal system, he said. The system, he added, was there to protect the people against excesses and highhandedness.

Encouraged by the assertion of independence by judiciary for the benefit of the citizens, a small spark of hope was kindled but when an attempt was made to reverse the gains, this small spark had turned into a prairie fire in 2007-08.

The chief justice said not just how a government came to power is important but it was also equally significant what it did thereafter ñ more particularly how it governed its people. He said if we were to compare Hitler’s Germany, Churchill’s England, or for that matter Mussolini’s Italy and Roosevelt’s America in the 1940s, the most obvious difference was the absence of a free press and an independent judiciary in the former. He said that a country where the press was muzzled and the judiciary enslaved, the system was fascist, not democratic. In such countries, he maintained, inhabitants were deluded of human liberty and dignity and deprived of basic fundamental rights.

He said if the legislature enacted a law which deprived a citizen of his right to life or property, the recourse was through the judicial review of challenging such statute in the courts. He said that the judicial review of legislative power was both recognized and ancient. He said that the power of judicial review was recognized in all civilized countries, including Pakistan, in the Constitution.

Mystery Solved: Why The Cat Craves Mushrooms (And People Do, Too)

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Why do cats have an affinity for mushrooms?

Marco Varrone/iStockphoto.com Why do cats have an affinity for mushrooms?

Anyone who lives with a cat knows that fruits and vegetables do not top the feline food chart. So it's a surprise to hear that some cats do crave mushrooms.

This tale starts with Ellen Jacobson, an amateur mushroom hunter in Colorado. As she was cooking up a bolete mushroom, her cat Cashew started brushing against her legs. She put some of the mushrooms in a bowl, and Cashew gobbled them up. "He didn't like them raw," she told The Salt. "He only liked them cooked."

She was puzzled as to why a meat-loving cat would love fungi. But she soon found that other peoples' cats wanted mushrooms, too.

That oddity is a clue to how the taste preferences of humans and animals evolved, based on the foods we need to survive.

Mushrooms have a lot of glutamate, an amino acid that gives them their rich, savory flavor. Glutamate is one of the chemicals responsible for the umami flavor; it's one of the five flavors sensed by humans, along with salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. (Check out Robert Krulwich's engaging piece on the origins of umami here.)

 

The notion that a cat might crave mushrooms isn't a big surprise to Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. For decades, he has been studying how different species sense flavor. Cats have been a big focus of his research.

In 2005, Beauchamp and his colleagues proved that cats, tigers and other felines can't taste sweetness because they lack a functional gene for sweetness taste receptors. But they do have genes for the receptors that detect the umami flavor of wide array of amino acids in protein. So Cashew and any other mushroom-craving cats are really on a hunt for protein, not for fungi, he says.

"One experiment nature made was to have certain species that eat nothing but meat," Beauchamp told The Salt. "How that shapes their sensory world can tell us something about how the sensory world of everyone, including humans, is constrained by biology."

It's a good thing that cats don't crave sweets; they aren't physically able to digest carbohydrates.

When Beauchamp's paper was published in 2005, he says, "We got a ton of mail saying, 'Yes, but my cat likes sweets.'" He thinks that those cats are responding to the fat or protein in cake and ice cream, not the sugar. And he thinks humans are probably deluding themselves if they think they can taste more flavors than animals.

Humans are omnivorous, and have a wide variety of flavor receptors, which help us identify the many foods that we can digest. Dogs have sweet receptors, too.

But veterinarians say that neither dogs nor cats should eat mushrooms, and the North American Mycological Association warns that both dogs and cats are attracted by the odor of wild mushrooms, and can be poisoned as a result.

The Salt cottoned onto this story thanks to Jef Akst, who wrote about Ellen Jacobson and her mushroom-craving cats the current edition of The Scientist. She had found the story thanks to two researchers who had seen Jacobson's article in a mycological newsletter out in Colorado, and wrote about it in a scientific journal.

So you never know where you're going to find a story that solves a mystery involving felines, fungi, and taste.

View the original article here