Ethics Headlines
#72        

Volume 2, Number 20
                            Friday, May 12, 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
  • Big night. Big plans. Big tab. Can the prom be tamed? Damon Robertson, a senior at Notre Dame High School here, will spend $130 for prom tickets and another $300 for tux, dinner, and flowers for his date. But bucking a prom-going trend of a dozen years' standing, he'll spend zip - nothing, nada, $0 - to hire a stretch limo for the evening of May 27.
  • Panel faults Pfizer in '96 clinical trial in Nigeria. A panel of Nigerian medical experts has concluded that Pfizer Inc. violated international law during a 1996 epidemic by testing an unapproved drug on children with brain infections at a field hospital.
  • Pardon unlikely for civil rights advocate. Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi acknowledges that Clyde Kennard suffered a grievous wrong at the hands of state officials more than 45 years ago. But he says he will not grant a posthumous pardon to Mr. Kennard, a black man who was falsely imprisoned after trying to desegregate a Mississippi college.
  • Self-confessed German cannibal convicted. A man who admitted killing an acquaintance he met on the Internet was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison Tuesday, following his retrial in a case that engrossed and appalled Germany. Armin Meiwes, a 44-year-old computer technician, also was convicted of disturbing the peace of the dead.
  • What is the price of plagiarism? The Internet provides plenty of temptations for would-be plagiarists, from essay-writing services to millions of web pages. The easy availability of such resources can cloud judgment and lead to misuse or abuse of information. "On the part of students, there's an eerie logic to justify cheating," says Denise Pope, a lecturer at the School of Education at Stanford University and author. "It's three o'clock in the morning, you're exhausted, you've worked hard ... rather than getting a zero, you'd take your chances with plagiarism."
  • Get Hashemi out of Yale. The only way Yale could have found someone less deserving of an American education than Taliban propagandist Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi is if university officials staged a jailbreak at Guantanamo Bay. Hashemi, identified as a "senior adviser" to the Taliban and a "personal adviser" to Mullah Mohammed Omar, defended forcing the burqa on Afghan women.


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