Ethics Headlines
#70        

Volume 2, Number 18
                            Friday, April 28, 2006


Ethics Headlines is an ethics-in-the-news clipping file published each Friday by Greg Feldmeth, a high school teacher at Polytechnic School in Pasadena, California. It contains news items from the media in the past week that deal with some area of ethical inquiry.

SUBSCRIBE. You can receive the file via email every Friday afternoon with links to the original articles. Just email your address here and put Ethics Headlines in the subject line. If you know of others who would be interested, please forward the page to them.

This week's headlines--select the headline to read the article
  • Kill the boy? Yes or no?  In Montgomery, Ala., a little before 11 o'clock on the night of Aug. 20, 1997, Adams burst into the home of the Andrew Mills family...Adams threatened Mills with a boning knife, robbed him of what cash he had on hand, and stupidly ordered him to go to an automatic banking machine and get some more. As soon as Mills left, Adams raped his wife, stabbed her repeatedly and killed her unborn child...Those are the facts. This is another fact: At the time of the crime in 1997, Adams was 17 years and 2 months old.
  • Young author admits borrowing passages. A Harvard University sophomore with a highly publicized first novel acknowledged Monday that she had borrowed material, accidentally, from another author's work and promised to change her book for future editions.
    • Aggrieved publisher rejects young novelist's apology.  A day after Kaavya Viswanathan admitted copying parts of her chick-lit novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," from another writer's works, the publisher of the two books she borrowed from called her apology "troubling and disingenuous."
  • University of Colorado tenure report plays it safe. Mend it, don't end it. That's the Cliffs Notes summary of a year-long review of tenure at the University of Colorado.
  • America's greatest paranoia. If America is a nation of immigrants, why is it that immigration remains so hotly debated? Why, if America is so great, should we see ourselves as so vulnerable? For if history is any guide, this perception of cultural vulnerability is, in the long run, always wrong. Always? Yes. America has long been awash with immigrants, all bringing in remarkably un-American ways of life and thought -- and, often, language -- yet we never have drowned in this flood.
  • Omaha plan would create race-based school districts. A perfect storm had brewed for months over the public schools here. But nobody in Nebraska saw this twister coming. In one surreal week at the Capitol, a surprise amendment from the state's only black senator reconfigured efforts to deliver relief to the Omaha School District. Under the bill swiftly signed this month by Gov. Dave Heineman, the urban district in 2008 would be carved into three new districts: one mostly white, one mostly black and one largely Hispanic. The law doesn't say that outright, but its mapping requirements make such an outcome inevitable, given the city's housing patterns. (Submitted by Andrew McCarthy)
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