Ethics

Good editorial in the Globe today advocating the use of screens around traffic accidents to decrease rubbernecking:  When officials put up green mesh screens after automobile accidents along British highways, they expected to observe a slight correlation between rubbernecking and traffic jams. But the correlation wasn't slight. Congestion cleared up almost immediately. The Miss Conduct philosophy in a nutshell. Etiquette and ethics are important, but if there is a way to engineer a situation so that people automatically do the right thing, that is the best...

A congressional ethics panel has concluded there is substantial reason to believe Rep. Vern Buchanan tried to get a former business partner to lie to the Federal Election Commission in violation of federal law and a House rule. Evidence shows Buchanan, a Florida Republican who owns several auto dealerships, tried to persuade ex-partner Sam Kazran to deny he was aware of reimbursements made to Buchanan contributors, according to the report made public Wednesday. Kazran refused to make the false statement to the FEC, the report said.

THE SERIES of Metro articles about the false Twitter account, "Brown adviser confesses he's Twitter's CrazyKhazei" (Aug. 25) and "Brown disavows Twitter tweaking" (Aug. 26), brings to light the responsibilities that communications professionals such as Eric Fehrnstrom bear but all too often choose to ignore. Fehrnstrom's seemingly naïve attempts at what Senator Scott Brown calls "levity" do nothing to further the political process. In addition, they are an insult to those of us who, as communications professionals representing clients and employers whose reputations rely in large part on our...

The Massachusetts Democratic Party today filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee, arguing that Senator Scott Brown abused public resources by using video shot by a government employee to promote his reelection campaign. The Globe reported last week that the video - of Brown sinking an underhanded, half-court basketball shot - was recorded by his Senate communications director, during an official event, and after that employee had flown to and from Massachusetts on an airline ticket bought by the taxpayers.

VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict XVI called yesterday for a new world financial order guided by ethics and the search for the common good, denouncing the profit-at-all-cost mentality blamed for bringing about the global financial meltdown. In the third encyclical of his pontificate, Benedict pressed for reform of the United Nations and international economic and financial institutions to give poorer countries more of a say in international policy. “There is urgent need [for]

"I live by the code, I die by the code. " That was how Marcus Hurd professed to feel about what happened in Mattapan on the night that left him paralyzed from a gunshot to the head, and ended with four others dead, including Hurd's drug dealer, a young mother, and her two-year-old son. It was almost like Hurd believed there was an unwritten law saying his shooting had been somehow inevitable: "Living in the streets," he said, "you're supposed to...

Chief Justice John Roberts has told Congress again that the Supreme Court doesn't plan to formally adopt rules that would bind it to the same code of conduct as other federal judges. This came in a letter released Tuesday by the court from Roberts to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Leahy wanted Roberts to make public an informal 1991 Supreme Court resolution saying justices would follow the same rules as judges on gifts, outside income, honoraria and employment.

I APPLAUD the work of my colleague Greg Epstein at Harvard University and the attention the local media have given it ( "Nonbelievers striving for humanist connections," Page A1, Oct. 17). Humanists in New York City are looking forward to an event he is holding here next month. My concern is his emphasis on atheism, which seems, at times, to put creed above deed, an order that 25-year-old Felix Adler reversed in 1876 when he founded Ethical Culture, a nontheistic religion of ethics.

LONDON - A former tabloid newspaper editor told Britain's media ethics inquiry yesterday that he published an inflammatory story about the parents of a missing girl because he thought there was a possibility the story could be true. The unfounded Daily Express story suggested that Kate and Gerry McCann, the parents of schoolgirl Madeleine McCann who disappeared from a Portugal resort, might have been linked to her 2007 abduction and possible death. The Daily Express newspaper had to make a front-page apology and pay a substantial settlement to the parents, but former chief editor Peter...

GILBERT, S.C. – After dismissing public requests for his income tax returns, Mitt Romney this afternoon called on Newt Gingrich to release potentially damaging records from a congressional ethics report, part of an effort to criticize the former House speaker on the eve of a South Carolina primary that a new poll shows may be slipping from Romney's grasp. The sharpened attacks from the former Massachusetts governor came even as he downplayed his chances in tomorrow's primary, saying, "I think I said from the very beginning South Carolina is an uphill battle for a guy from...

Yahoo is facing a showdown with a major shareholder who wants the troubled Internet company to fire CEO Scott Thompson for unethical conduct. The shareholder, activist hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, told Yahoo's board of directors last week that he might take legal action if Thompson isn't ousted by noon ET Monday. Loeb contends Yahoo needs to get rid of Thompson because he allowed an inaccuracy about his academic credentials appear in a regulatory filing, as well on the company's website for investors.

U.S. Secret Service agents will be getting ethics training from professors at Johns Hopkins University following a prostitution scandal in Colombia. About 100 agents will take part in two days of training this week in Laurel, Md., outside Washington. The Secret Service had previously scheduled training for 20 agents. It expanded the program after allegations that 12 of its agents hired prostitutes in Cartagena days before President Barack Obama arrived in the country for a summit.

The chairman of the House Financial Services Committee said Monday he's been cleared by an ethics panel that investigated his investment activities leading up to and surrounding Congress' $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., said the Office of Congressional Ethics voted 6-0 on Friday to dismiss allegations that he profited from nonpublic information learned on the job. The OCE is a House panel run by a board that does not include current members of Congress.

BOSTON - Former Massachusetts treasurer Timothy P. Cahill did nothing wrong when he aired taxpayer-funded ads for the state lottery while he was running for governor, his new lawyer said Wednesday. Cahill is charged with violating state ethics laws and procurement fraud in airing the lottery ads to promote his unsuccessful independent campaign for governor in 2010. The treasurer oversees the lottery. The indictments were the first issued by the attorney general's office under a new state ethics law that went into effect in 2009.

San Francisco's ethics commission is scheduled to begin hearing testimony in the city's misconduct case against Ross Mirkarimi, the suspended sheriff removed from his job after being charged with domestic violence. The commission hearing on Monday comes after a San Francisco judge last week refused Mirkarimi's request to toss the city's misconduct case and reinstate him. The former city supervisor and recently elected sheriff, Mirkarimi last month pleaded guilty to one count of misdemeanor false imprisonment after being accused of bruising the arm of his wife,...

The secret fear of anybody, anywhere who has ever managed a complicated business is that, unbeknownst to them, something very bad could be going on somewhere in that business ("Secret Service lapses require a rigorous, independent probe," Editorial, April 18). The Secret Service case illustrates the need for effective monitoring and evaluation programs specifically geared to potential ethical violations at all levels of organizations; ongoing training programs concerned with ethical issues that are likely to be encountered; the establishment of strict disciplinary procedures...

WASHINGTON -- In awarding Representative William Jefferson a new lease on his political life, Louisiana voters this weekend also handed Democrat Nancy Pelosi another ethics dilemma as she prepares to become the new speaker of the House. Jefferson won a runoff election Saturday despite being dogged by a federal corruption investigation and FBI allegations that he had $90,000 in bribe money in his freezer. He won a ninth term by a surprising landslide, defeating fellow black Democrat Karen Carter with 57 percent of the vote in the first election for the Second...

LONDON -- Author and academic Stuart Hampshire, a former chairman of the department of philosophy at Princeton University who argued that philosophy must be studied within the context of other disciplines, died Sunday at home in Oxford, central England. He was 89. After graduating from Oxford University, Mr. Hampshire taught at his alma mater and at the University of London before moving to Princeton in 1963. He retired from there in 1970 and taught at Stanford and again at Oxford.

SEOUL — An unfolding political scandal ahead of Wednesday's parliamentary elections has many South Koreans drawing comparisons with Watergate: illicit surveillance, an attempted coverup, destruction of evidence, arrests of people connected to the president, and questions over what the president himself may have known. Recent disclosures have fueled a public furor, forced prosecutors to reopen a 2010 investigation, and dominated the election season, with opposition leaders calling for President Lee Myung Bak's resignation.

"I live by the code, I die by the code. " That was how Marcus Hurd professed to feel about what happened in Mattapan on the night that left him paralyzed from a gunshot to the head, and ended with four others dead, including Hurd's drug dealer, a young mother, and her two-year-old son. It was almost like Hurd believed there was an unwritten law saying his shooting had been somehow inevitable: "Living in the streets," he said, "you're supposed to...