Ethics Headlines
#73        

Volume 2, Number 21
                            Friday, May 19, 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
  • Wrong to pay whistleblowers, committee told. The new Canadian Tory government's plan to give bureaucratic whistleblowers $1,000 for exposing wrongdoing is not a good idea and should be scrapped from the proposed Accountability Act, says Canada's public service integrity commissioner.
  • Chinese version of Wikipedia is launched. China's biggest Internet search site, Baidu.com, has launched a Chinese-language encyclopedia inspired by the cooperative reference site Wikipedia, which the communist government bars China's Web surfers from seeing. The Chinese service, which debuted in April, carries entries written by users, but warns that it will delete content about sex, terrorism and attacks on the government.
  • Termination, suspension possible for Churchill. Governor calls for controversial professor to resign. University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill plagiarized, fabricated and falsified material and was disrespectful of American Indian traditions in his writings, a report released today said. Three of the five scholars who examined the ethnic studies professor's work for four months believe Churchill's academic misconduct is serious enough that CU could fire him from his tenured job, the report said.
  • Colleges chase as cheats shift to higher tech. With their arsenal of electronic gadgets, students these days find it easier to cheat. And so, faced with an array of inventive techniques in recent years, college officials find themselves in a new game of cat and mouse, trying to outwit would-be cheats this exam season with a range of strategies — cutting off Internet access from laptops, demanding the surrender of cellphones before tests or simply requiring that exams be taken the old-fashioned way, with pens and paper.
  • Tate is sentenced to 30 years for murder committed when he was 12, and faces life. Lionel Tate, on probation for murdering a younger playmate in 1999 when he was 12 years old, was sentenced today to 30 years in prison for violating the terms of his probation. But Mr. Tate, whose original life sentence in the killing set off a nationwide debate over sentencing of youthful offenders, still faces the possibility of life in prison for the act that constituted the probation violation, robbing a pizza deliveryman at gunpoint in 2004.


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