Gender Parity Index (GPI) of access to primary and secondary schools (a GPI of 1 indicates parity between boys and girls; less than 1 indicates greater access for boys)

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Source: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)report, “Education For All Global Monitoring Report,” released Nov. 5, 2003.

VANCOUVER
Can Pepsi learn anything from Kant?

The answer is unfolding in a public school near you. But don’t look for it in a humanities seminar or a business classroom. Look in the corner where they’ve put the vending machines. As obesity catches up with drugs, alcohol, and tobacco on North America’s health-risk list, there’s rising concern about selling soda and junk food to kids in schools. Result: The ethical issues surrounding vending machines are proliferating faster than quarters from a bill changer.

Consider the case of Nicholas Dodds, a 15-year-old student in Ontario. Two years ago, he filed briefs with Ontario’s Information and Privacy commissioner to force Pepsi and Coca Cola to reveal the contents of their contracts with two of the province’s largest school districts. Last week he won: The Commissioner ordered the boards to release the details.

The decision was cheered by those who worry that bad dietary habits may be linked to obesity. In the United States, where the Centers for Disease Control estimates that 13 percent of children are overweight, half of the nation’s school districts are thought to have contracts with cola companies. And look what’s happening:

• In California, where as many as 25 percent of children may be overweight, bans on soft-drink sales are already in place in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Berkeley school districts. Next July, that ban will spread to the entire state’s elementary, middle, and junior high schools, stopping soda sales during the school day.
• In September, New York City announced a five-year, $166 million contract with Snapple, the U.K.-based drink company, to replace soda with fruit drinks in its 1,200 schools and its other municipal buildings.
• Last June, the National PTA hit a buzz saw of controversy for giving the chief lobbyist of Coca Cola Enterprises, John Downs, Jr., a seat on its board, and for listing the company as one of its official sponsors.

Why would schools want soft-drink machines in the first place? The deal is straightforward: Promote our products, the soda firms say, and we’ll give you a share of profits amounting to tens of thousands of dollars a year. That’s a welcome windfall in an era when tight budgets have trimmed purchases of things like computers, library books, athletic equipment, and band instruments.

Built into some contracts, however, are incentives not only to offer but to promote these products. A confidential contract just made public between Pepsi and the Vancouver schools indicates how explicit those incentives were. According to the Vancouver Sun, the contract specified that “Increased consumption (equals) increased purchases (equals) increased revenue.” What’s in it for Pepsi? Not just short-term student purchases but long-term brand loyalty, as these students become adult customers.

Last week, I asked a number of educators here whether they could see any ethical (rather than financial) case for not banning soda sales in schools. Several of them cited the uncertainty of the research about links between junk food and obesity. Others noted the unfairness of banning soft drinks without banning other junk food. They also noted that the ban may miss the real source of obesity: their students’ sedentary habits and poor physical condition, as well as the cutbacks in funding for physical education. One of them also raised the issue of supervision. He worried that students who wanted junk food would find their way to nearby convenience stores anyway. He’d rather they remained in the building, where at least they would be under safe adult supervision.

But I didn’t sense deep enthusiasm for any of these arguments. Would these educators want to continue with such contracts if money weren’t the issue? The answer was a pretty emphatic no!

And that’s where young Nicholas Dodds and old Immanuel Kant come into play. “Students are not in schools so they can be used as a captive audience for Pepsi,” Dodds said. “They’re not there to be marketed to.”

Kant would be proud. In one formulation of his famous categorical imperative, the German philosopher laid down a relevant guide to ethical behavior: We ought always to treat others as ends, he said, not merely as means. So students aren’t to be treated as a means for soda-makers to meet their ends. They are, themselves, the fully dignified ends of their own being and should be treated as such.

At bottom, the issue isn’t just about soda and obesity. It’s about allowing any sort of marketing in schools, including ads on closed-circuit classroom television. Sure, it’s convenient. And it makes money. But taxpayers also need to treat students as Kant would want them to — not as a means to make up budget shortfalls by subjecting them to the soft-drink hard sell, but as representatives of the highest end any community can have: the moral education of its young.

(c)2003 Institute for Global Ethics

“This is not the case of a camera crew or reporter showing up just as something is breaking. It’s not just a snapshot. You get the whole before, during, and after. You get a clearer picture and a better story.”

– Miami Police Chief John Timoney discussing his plans to embed reporters with police squads keeping watch over this week’s large-scale trade talks, which are expected to draw tens of thousands of protesters. The Associated Press, Reuters, the Miami Herald, CNN, Fox, NBC, and several TV stations have been invited to participate, according to the AP.

* * * * *

“Journalists are supposed to be independent gatherers of information. (Embedding) is going to put journalists in the police view of the world. At least in a war theater you can make the arguments that there is no other way for journalists to have access to the battlefield. I don’t think that analogy holds on the streets of Miami.”

– Robert Jensen, associated professor of journalism law and ethics at the University of Texas at Austin, speaking to the AP about the police department’s plans. (“Police to Embed Journalists at Protests,” AP, Nov. 10)

CHICAGO
Stung by a series of ethics scandals and the resulting loss of several government contracts, Boeing Co. last week said it was forming an in-house ethics office that reports directly to the firm’s CEO.

The new unit — the Office of Internal Governance — will be headed by Bonnie Soodik, a current Boeing executive running a $3 billion unit, reported the Reuters news agency.

Giving her direct access to Boeing chairman and CEO Phil Condit is necessary to prove the company’s seriousness of purpose when dealing with reforms to its corporate culture, according to Condit.

“Today’s action reflects the full agreement of our board and our senior management team that the commitment to these important areas must be set at the very top,” Condit said in a statement.

The move followed a series of high-profile ethics scandals. Last January, the congressional General Accounting Office accused Boeing of stealing data from Raytheon while bidding for a weapons system contract in 1990. In July, the Air Force charged Boeing with using more than 25,000 documents stolen from Lockheed Martin when bidding for a $1.88 billion contract in 1998.

As punishment, Boeing was stripped of roughly $1 billion in launches and has been temporarily barred from receiving government contracts. Boeing admits possessing the Lockheed documents, but denies using them to get an unfair advantage over Lockheed, according to the Associated Press.

Currently, Boeing is caught up in a controversy over an Air Force plan to lease a fleet of Boeing 767s — a deal that critics say is a boondoggle riddled with conflict-of-interest breaches.

In separate news, Tyco International, another firm beset with ethics issues, last week said it has inked a deal to provide legal compliance and ethics training to its 260,000 workers, the AP reported.

Former Tyco head Dennis Kozlowski is on trial for bilking the Bermuda-based firm of $600 million.

PARIS
A Paris court last week handed down several long-awaited sentences in the high-profile trials of executives from Elf, the former state-owned oil company that became the center of a national corruption scandal.

Former Elf chairman Loik Le Floch-Prigent, 60, was sentenced to five years in prison and fined $435,000. His deputy, Alfred Sirven, 76, also received a five-year prison sentence and a fine of $1.16 million.

Andre Tarallo, 76, known as “Mr. Africa” for his role in facilitating Elf’s business on the continent, was sentenced to four years in prison and fined $2.3 million reported the Associated Press.

Le Floch-Prigent and Sirven, both of whom have admitted their roles in ELF’s extensive graft and bribery schemes, already are serving prison sentences for convictions in a related trial. Only Tarallo steadfastly has denied wrongdoing.

The men, accused of skimming Elf profits to finance lavish lifestyles during the late 1980s and early 1990s, say Elf’s corporate culture was rife with corruption and bribery by the time they arrived. They say they simply got caught up in the corrupt climate.

That argument won little leniency following four months of hearings, which ended in July. More than 30 other Elf executives and associates are on trial for similar charges.

Also sentenced last week was Le Floch-Prigents ex-wife, Fatima Belaid, who was convicted of accepting $5.3 million to keep quiet about the corruption following her divorce, which was paid for with illicit funds, according to the Agence France-Presse.

Belaid was sentenced to three years in prison, with two years suspended, and $1.16 million in fines.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

MONTREAL
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is reporting that the Quebec Federation of Labour’s Solidarity Fund is selling its $70 million stake in one of North America’s most successful T-shirt and apparel companies, Gildan Activewear, and taking its representative off the company’s board due to alleged unfair labor practices.

The Solidarity Fund is claiming that Gildan fired 38 workers at its plant in Honduras, were the workers were involved in a union-organizing initiative. The company has grown in value and size, employing almost a thousand workers in Quebec, partly due to roughly $23 million in loans from the Solidarity Fund.

Gildan is vigorously contesting the allegations of the Solidarity Fund and the Honduran workers, claiming that it operates all of its facilities in an ethical work environment and respects the labor laws of every jurisdiction in which it operates.

CHICAGO
Pushed to tighten their belts, many of the nation’s businesses may be overlooking one resource vital to their bottom lines — the health of their workers, according to two studies released last week.

One in eight workers is suffering from pain that also hurts their productivity, costing an average of five working hours a week, according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

The loss, which the studies claim is due more to a slow drain on daily productivity than outright absence, adds up to an annual cost of more than $61 billion for U.S. businesses — a figure far higher than necessary.

The report’s lead author, Dr. Walter Stewart, says many of those hours could be recovered if firms adopted awareness campaigns or preemptive measures like ergonomically friendly workstations, reported the Associated Press.

A second report released last week warns that 80 percent of surveyed workers say they plan to look for a new job as soon as the economy recovers, with many saying they are being pushed to do too much with too little help.

While only a fraction of those with wandering eyes will actually move on, the number is still “very, very high,” says Frank Scanlon of the Society for Human Resource Professionals, which undertook the survey.

Nearly 40 percent of workers say they are clocking average weeks of at least 50 hours, yet feel unable to complain for fear of being pink-slipped like their former coworkers, according to the report from CNN.

“People have been traumatized by the last 15 years of downsizing and the last few years of recession,” Joe Robinson, founder of the Work to Live Web site, told CNN. “Everyone’s afraid they’ll be next.”

HARTLEPOOL, England
The English port of Hartlepool last week became the staging ground for a fight over who should be responsible for dealing with 13 decrepit and toxin-laden U.S. ships crossing the ocean to be destroyed by a U.K. firm.

The 13 ships — part of a vast collection of abandoned military vessels rusting in a Virginia river — were scheduled to be destroyed in Hartlepool by British salvage company Able UK, which won the $16.7 million contract for the work. Because they were built many years before environmental constraints were a consideration, the ships contain asbestos, PCBs, and heavy oils that could leak if the fragile hulls are damaged.

Under pressure from environmental and local groups, the U.K. Environmental Agency (EA), which had signed off on the deal, reversed its decision and pulled its support, saying Able UK lacked some of the needed licenses.

Now with one ship in port and three others already on their way, the fate of the 17 vessels is up in the air and scheduled to be decided by the High Court next month, reported Deutsche Welle.

The debate pits a straightforward business deal against protest groups that say importing ships built with asbestos and toxic materials makes little sense and turns Hartlepool into “America’s dustbin.”

Peter Mandelson, the minister of Parliament for Hartlepool, last week said environmental group Friends of the Earth had “alarmed and whipped up public opinion” to the point of irresponsibility.

“Like all ships, they contain some hazardous materials, but they are not inherently dangerous and they are not carrying any toxic cargo,” Mandelson said.

“These ships have ended their useful life and we need the work in this area,” a local carpenter agreed in a report from the Reuters news agency. “We’re living in one of the biggest chemical complexes in Europe and this won’t make any difference.”

But Friends of the Earth campaign director Mike Childs said such observations were partly beside the point.

“We don’t want these ships in the U.K.,” Childs told Reuters. “America has the capacity to deal with its own waste and the moral obligation to do so.”

The Deutsche Welle report, citing comments from Greenpeace, notes that such principles are not always the rule either in the States, which has sent ships to Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan for destruction, or in the United Kingdom.

“While the U.K. appears to be the victim in this case, Britain is one of the largest exporters of vessels and toxic waste, mainly to countries such as India and China where the working standards are lower and the risk of pollution on delivery is higher,” said the Greenpeace spokesperson.

WASHINGTON
One week after the Bush administration said it was dropping investigations of more than 70 power plants accused of violating the Clean Air Act, a handful of Northeastern states said they would pursue the abandoned charges.

Attorneys general from Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York say their efforts are necessary to preserve the health of their people and environments, which lie downwind from the allegedly pollutive facilities.

The states’ will focus on a few of the more than 70 power plants that were being investigated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for allegedly emitting excessive pollution under the Clean Air Act.

In September, the Bush administration relaxed clean-air laws, giving the energy industry more leeway to modify deteriorating plants without upgrading their antipollution devices.

The EPA then told its enforcement lawyers to drop their investigations into many plants accused of violating the tougher version of the law, saying the newly relaxed laws trumped the old standards.

The EPA also said it is considering dropping 13 other cases already referred to the Justice Department for action, reported the Washington Post.

Last month, 12 states and more than 20 cities sued the Bush administration over the relaxed rules. Last week’s action piggybacks on that effort by directly targeting the power companies, which the states claim should be held accountable for allegedly breaking the law, even if that law has recently been relaxed.

“There’s no question some of these cases are so egregious that court action is inevitable,” Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal claimed last week.

The New York Times noted that even though the states’ scant resources will force them to focus on a fraction of the cases abandoned by the EPA, they may have leverage the federal government lacks.

“Under provisions of the Clean Air Act, any individual can sue over pollution violations and seek huge fines that could force some of the utilities back to the bargaining table and reduce pollutants,” the Times reported. Coalitions of individuals and states could also bring the issue to the forefront in the next presidential election, according to the Times.

NEW YORK
After years of mounting home-run records and raised eyebrows, Major League Baseball (MLB) last week said it will subject its increasingly muscle-bound players to steroid tests for at least the next two years.

Last week’s announcement follows news that random tests of nearly 1,200 players this year detected steroids in 5 to 7 percent of the samples, reported the Associated Press.

That figure crosses a threshold spelled out in baseball’s labor deal with the MLB, kicking in a contract clause that mandates random steroid tests for the next two years. If the rate of positive tests does not fall below 2.5 percent, the tests will continue in 2006, noted the New York Times.

While this year’s tests were anonymous, future tests will be tied to the taker, allowing MLB to hit users with penalties ranging from treatment for the first positive test to suspensions of up to one year and fines of $100,000 for the fifth positive result.

Before this year’s round of tests, many had called on MLB to start testing players after sluggers began showing up for spring training supersized and slamming record numbers of home runs.

Former superstars Jose Canseco and Ken Caminiti, both seasoned MVPs, had estimated as much as 50 percent of players were using steroids, noted the Times.

While last season’s 5 to 7 percent positive rate “is hardly the sign that you have rampant use of anything,” according to baseball labor executive Rob Manfred, some say other factors may have suppressed results.

Chief among those factors is the possibility of designer steroids like the newly discovered THG, which was not among the substances tested for in 2003 by the MLB.

A grand jury in San Francisco has subpoenaed power hitters Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi, as well as nearly 40 other athletes on record as clients of Balco, the company that engineered THG. Both men have said they only received nutritional supplements from Balco, noted the Times.

MLB says it will begin screening for THG when it starts the next round of steroid tests in March.

“Hopefully, this will, over time, allow us to completely eradicate the use of performance enhancement substances in baseball,” MLB commissioner Bud Selig said.

NEW YORK
Despite a 1998 agreement to stop marketing their products to children, four leading tobacco companies have continued advertising in school editions of three news magazines — a practice that now will cease under an agreement announced last week.

The tobacco firms — Brown & Williamson, Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, and U.S. Smokeless Tobacco — agreed to pull their ads from the education editions of Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report.

The deal came after several state attorneys general complained about the practice, which New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer called “a clear violation” of the $206 billion settlement between companies and 46 states in 1998, noted the Reuters news agency.

Between January 2002 and June 2003, nearly 120 ads for cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products appeared in the student editions of the popular news magazines, which are distributed free or at low rates to schools.

BERLIN
After weeks of emotional debate, the board overseeing Germany’s national Holocaust memorial last week said they would not abandon the services of a firm that supplied the cyanide gas used in Nazi concentration camps.

The memorial project, in the works since 1988, was put on hold in September after organizers discovered the tie between German firm Degussa and the country’s Nazi past.

Degussa, which had been hired to treat the memorial’s 2,700 vertical slabs with an anti-graffiti chemical, was co-owner of the firm that made the cyanide-gas tablets used to kill millions in concentration camps.

Complicating the debate was the discovery that a Degussa subsidiary already had supplied a thinner used in much of the memorial’s concrete foundation and slabs.

Rejecting Degussa’s services would have meant ripping out the foundation, setting the financially struggling 15-year-old project even further back, reported the Associated Press.

While critics said Degussa should be spurned for its role in murdering millions, others pointed to the company’s modern acts of atonement, including helping establish a compensation fund for victims of the Nazi regime.

The debate has pushed Germans to further explore the nation’s ability to make peace with its troubled past, according to the AP report.

“We knew at the very beginning that we’re now building with companies that are of course German and that existed before 1945,” one German lawmaker told ZDF television. “But we decided earlier, when we decided to build the memorial, that we would have to do it with these burdened companies.”

Current plans call for the $30 million memorial to be finished by May 2005.

MONTGOMERY, Alabama
Remaining defiant until the end, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore was removed from the bench last week by the state’s Court of the Judiciary for refusing to obey a federal court order mandating the removal of a 2.5-ton granite monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments.

According to the New York Times, the presiding judge of the Court of the Judiciary, William Thompson, stated that by refusing to remove the monument, “the chief justice placed himself above the law” and, worse, “showed no signs of contrition for his actions.”

Moore was put on paid leave in August after defying a federal appeals court ruling that ordered the removal of the Ten Commandments monument, which the chief justice had secretly installed in the courthouse rotunda in the middle of the night two years ago. The U.S. Supreme Court recently refused to hear his appeal.

Emerging from the courthouse after the unanimous decision was announced, Moore proclaimed to supporters: “I have absolutely no regrets. I have done what I was sworn to do,” according to the AP.

Moore went on to state, “It’s about whether or not you can acknowledge God as a source of our law and our liberty. That’s all I’ve done. I’ve been found guilty.”

The state’s attorney general, William Pryor, Jr., who was once an ally of Moore and who has been nominated by President Bush for a federal appellate judgeship, led the prosecution.

According to the Times, Pryor stated that “the chief justice had put himself above the law.”

According to the AP, the state Court of the Judiciary is “an ad hoc panel of judges, lawyers, and others appointed variously by judges, legal leaders, and the governor and lieutenant governor.” A decision for removal must be unanimous, though it is not permanent. Moore was elected to his position, and, according to the Times, could run again in the next election.

Showing no remorse for his actions or their consequences, Moore told the Times: “I’d do it all the same all over again. I said it back then and I’ll say it again now: God is the basis of our law and our government. I cannot and will not violate my conscience.”

From the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO):

“Despite slow but significant progress achieved in the 1990s, girls continue to face ’sharp discrimination in access to schooling’ in a majority of developing countries, according to a global report released today in New Delhi.

“Gender parity in education remains a distant prospect in 54 countries including 16 countries in sub-Saharan Africa as well as Pakistan and India, says the latest ‘Education For All Global Monitoring Report,’ the most comprehensive survey of education trends worldwide. In China, the most populous country in the world, boys will continue to outnumber girls in secondary schools for many years to come.

“‘While not a complete surprise, these results are obviously a cause for deep concern,’ says Koïchiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO. ‘Gender parity in education is a priority not only because inequality is a major infringement of fundamental human rights but because it represents an important obstacle to social and economic development.’

“Gender equality in education is one of the six goals of the Education For All program endorsed by 164 governments at the World Education Forum, in Dakar, Senegal, in April 2000. As a first step to achieving equality, they set the target of 2005 to achieve gender parity (equal enrolment of boys and girls) in primary and secondary education.

“The report measures efforts being made in all parts of the world to enroll more girls in school. In the decade to 2000, the number of girls in primary school increased faster than that of boys, with the global Gender Parity Index (GPI) rising from 0.89 to 0.93 (a GPI of 1 indicates parity between the sexes). But 57% of the estimated 104 million primary-age children out of school worldwide are girls, which suggests that discrimination remains a pressing problem. Of the 128 countries for which data for the reference year 2000 is available, 52 have already achieved gender parity or will have done so by 2005 at primary and secondary level.

“Amongst the poorest performers in terms of girls’ access to primary school, according to the Report, are Chad with a GPI of 0.63, Yemen (0.63), Guinea-Bissau (0.67), Benin (0.68), Niger (0.68), Ethiopia (0.69), Central African Republic (0.69), Burkina Faso (0.71), Guinea (0.72), Mali (0.72), Liberia (0.73), and Pakistan (0.74)…. Girls’ enrolment in these countries is only three quarters that of boys. India, with a GPI of 0.83 at primary level, is only slightly ahead.

“While the situation globally leaves girls at a disadvantage, the Report points out that because too many boys do not finish secondary education, the balance has tipped in favour of girls at this level in several countries including Bangladesh (1.05), Denmark (1.05), Mexico (1.05), New Zealand (1.06), Bahrain (1.07), Iceland (1.07) Russian Federation (1.07), Trinidad and Tobago (1.07) Colombia (1.10), Philippines (1.10), Malaysia (1.11), United Arab Emirates (1.12), United Kingdom (1.17), Suriname (1.18) and Sweden (1.26)….”

“Education is the chief defense of nations.”

– Edmund Burke (British statesman and orator, 1729-1797)