Ethics Newsline®

The other day I stopped by our local garage, a trim, gray-stained, three-bay affair hugging the verge of Route 1. With the Maine winter not far off, I needed Mike to put the snow tires on my car. I’d also run over a parking-lot curb one misty night the week before, so I thought I’d talk to him about an alignment.

I pulled around to the side where he keeps his 55-gallon waste oil drums, painted in different colors and lined up like a rank of pudgy toy soldiers, and recalled that I used to see Mike a lot more often. Back in the 1970s, our family owned a succession of station wagons that regularly went out of alignment. You’d touch a curb or hit a patch of potholes, and the front end would immediately develop a case of the wobbles. If you didn’t visit Mike pretty regularly, you’d soon be looking at some oddly worn treads and a bill for two new tires.

But for years I hadn’t thought about alignments. Why not? Maybe, despite my recent nocturnal encounter, I was driving better. Maybe there were fewer potholes — though you couldn’t prove that by the road up to our house. Or maybe the cars we’d owned recently were better engineered. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t recall when I last had to change tires because of those lopsided bald patches.

I went inside, and Mike and I set a time for an appointment. As I was leaving his sign caught my eye. “Mike’s Align & Repair,” it said, offering customers a distinction I hadn’t focused on before. When something’s damaged or broken, you fix it. But when something’s in fine shape but a bit out of whack, you bring it back into line. Mike knows the difference between aligning and repairing, and he won’t charge you for a replacement when all you need is an adjustment. That’s what has earned him so many loyal customers over the years.

As I drove away, reflecting on the success of small-business integrity in rural America, I recalled a workshop we’d just conducted on moral courage. At one point, discussing the opposite of courage, we asked the participants to identify the qualities that go along with cowardice. In a few minutes we’d filled a flip-chart with words like fearful, defensive, self-centered, indifferent, sullen, inconclusive, fretful, mean, removed, cynical, passive, and fractured. Any business that merits this description will never come close to building the loyalty that Mike has. But does that mean the business is broken? Or are things simply out of line?

You hear a lot these days about the need for organizational alignment. It’s not something you do in a three-bay garage, but it’s a good analogy. Organizations, like cars, can get botched up. They hit economic potholes and flip off their wheel weights. They bounce hard over hidden regulatory curbs or cross ditches of morale at odd angles. And before you know it, they start to wobble. That’s when they lose confidence, muffle their moral courage, and settle for a fuzzy pragmatism that borders on deceit. Mistaking bluster for integrity and stubbornness for fortitude, they slip into the moral cowardice described on our flip-chart.

When that happens, what they need is the managerial equivalent of Mike’s Align & Repair. Too often, however, what they get is either Slick Willie’s Fix-It-Cheap or the Royal Reconstruction Service. Though the price is different, each one’s got the same answer: Things are really messed up here, so let’s gut this puppy and do a total makeover.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m no fan of organizational cowardice. But most of the time I suspect that what a cowardly organization needs is not repair but realignment. The thing still runs, after all: It’s not as though the front wheels are at right angles to the chassis. They’re just off by a few degrees. Sure, that’s a key divergence, enough to keep you from running up to speed. But all it needs is someone with the right equipment and the skill to set it right.

Why? Because a lot of what seems to be cowardice isn’t the opposite of courage, but the counterfeit of it. It’s not that employees have set themselves deliberately at variance with moral courage. They don’t hate putting integrity into practice or bringing values into action. They’ve just drifted off into something that looks like courage but isn’t. They don’t like feeling fretful and defensive, but they don’t quite know where they went wrong. It won’t help to tell them, “Okay, let’s tear it out and start over.” Nor will it do to fall back on that shallowest of excuses, “Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Those words are perfectly true in theory — and frightfully harmful in practice. Lots of things that aren’t broken still need alignment.

Mike knows that. He doesn’t give you a new front end, nor does he walk away saying, “Nothing’s busted, so I can’t help.” He rolls you into the bay and tweaks your camber and toe adjustments until everything comes into line. He knows you’re made of good stuff. His job is just to point all your parts in the right direction.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

“We have so many examples like this of people on relevant committees receiving these contributions from people who are under their jurisdictions. It’s sad to say, but it is pretty much business as usual in Washington. And it shows why so many Americans just shake their heads over the way Washington works.”

– Meredith McGehee, policy director for the Campaign Legal Center, talking to the New York Times about phone company contributions to senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.V.), one of the primary supporters of retroactive immunity for phone companies that have cooperated with the Bush administration in possibly illegal surveillance of their customers.

The Times, covering figures first reported by Wired, notes that from 2002 through 2006, Sen. Rockefeller received only $4,050 from AT&T and Verizon. But between only last March and June — as lawsuits against the companies were being threatened or filed — that figure skyrocketed to $42,850. A spokeswoman for Sen. Rockefeller dismissed as “patently false” the suggestion that he would “make policy decisions based on campaign contributions.”

McGehee says that even if the companies’ donations have not influenced Rockefeller, they — and the myriad like them — leave the door open to doubt in the public’s mind, creating conflicts of interest that “corrode public confidence.”

WASHINGTON
Two ethics issues appeared likely to complicate what was expected to be a smooth confirmation process for U.S. attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey.

The most controversial matter centered on Mukasey’s stance on harsh interrogation techniques used on suspected terrorists. According to the International Herald Tribune, some Democratic senators suggested publicly for the first time that they might oppose Mukasey if he does not clarify his stance on water boarding, a technique that simulates drowning.

And, reports UPI, a prominent Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking GOP member of the Judiciary Committee, also expressed dissatisfaction with Mukasey’s testimony.

Saying he did not know the precise details of how suspects were questioned, Mukasey was vague in his responses about whether water boarding constitutes torture, his critics charge.

Early in his confirmation hearings, Mukasey was pressed on whether water boarding was unconstitutional. His response — “If it amounts to torture, it is unconstitutional” — was criticized by one Democrat as a “purely semantic” equivocation, reports Congressional Quarterly.

In another controversial statement, Mukasey said he does not believe the Constitution prevents the president from wiretapping suspected terrorists without a court order. In a written response reprinted in the Baltimore Sun, Mukasey maintained that “foreign intelligence-gathering is a field in which the executive branch is regulated but not pre-empted by Congress.”

OTTAWA
A proposed law in Canada would require all voters to show their faces before being allowed to vote, including Muslim women who, in conformity with their beliefs, wear veils.

The issue has evolved into a sometimes bitter national controversy after a recent ruling from Canada’s elections board allowed Muslim women to vote in three recent Quebec contests without lifting their veils, reports the CanWest News Service.

In the most recent Quebec provincial election, the veil issue ratcheted up debate over how far the province should go in accommodating immigrants, according to the Globe & Mail, with one local leader’s popularity surging after he suggested the province had gone too far in “catering” to newcomers.

House leader Peter Van Loan told the Toronto Star that requiring voters to show their faces when presenting identification for admittance into the voting booth would reduce fraud and is “necessary to maintaining public confidence in … the electoral process.”

Opposition parties and some Muslim groups are suggesting that the new law will inflame anti-immigrant sentiment, reports the Globe & Mail.

The only exception to the rule would be for voters who have bandages covering facial wounds, reports the Times of India.

CHICAGO
Former Illinois governor George Ryan last week was ordered to begin serving a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence on November 7, but his lawyers hope to keep him free while he takes his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ryan, who was convicted of soliciting state contracts for friends, siphoning tax money to fund his campaigns, and covering up bribery in the state’s drivers license agency, will ask a federal appeals court to stay the court order for him to surrender, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Chicago Tribune reports that Ryan’s lawyers are claiming that a variety of irregularities in the trial may interest the nation’s highest court.

If the stay is not granted and the Supreme Court refuses to hear the appeal, the 73-year-old Ryan will reach what his lawyer called “the end of the line” and will have to report to state prison, reports the Associated Press.

Chicago TV station WBBM visited Ryan’s hometown of Kankakee, Illinois, and quizzed residents about the former governor’s impending sentence. Neighbor Virginia Gordon said, “Frankly I don’t think that anything that’s gone against Gov. Ryan isn’t anything that hasn’t happened in politics for a long, long time … but this was time that he got caught up in it.”

WBBM reporters found fewer sympathetic citizens at the local barbershop. “I hate to see a man of his age go to jail, anybody of that age go to jail,” resident Tom Carroll said. “But I guess the people have spoken — he had his day in court.”

In addition to the corruption scandal, Ryan gained national attention for one of his last acts as governor: commuting all death sentences in the state to life in prison over concerns that the death-penalty process in Illinois was gravely flawed.

LONDON
The agency that awards the Britain’s coveted “organic” status to food says it will strip that label from products flown into the United Kingdom unless producers meet stricter ethical standards.

The BBC and ITN report that the Soil Association, which certifies most of the $3.8 billion organic food sector, says importing firms must show that the trade brings tangible benefits to farmers in the developing world.

Last week’s announcement represents a compromise between conflicting ethical standards because some environmental organizations had complained that shipping food in by air freight harmed the environment because of carbon emissions from airplanes. Others countered that withholding certification from companies using air freight could harm farmers in poor countries and slow economic development, according to the Reuters news agency.

In order to receive the organic label, firms flying food into the United Kingdom must begin, by 2009, to invest in local communities, allow their workers to unionize, and fund local education efforts, according to the London Daily Telegraph.

LONDON
Controversial new guidelines in the United Kingdom specify that nurses will now be able to decide if a dying patient should be resuscitated.

London’s Evening Standard reports that until now only physicians were allowed to determine whether there was any point in continuing to save a patient,. That responsibility now can be extended to “suitably experienced nurses” under the guidelines published by the British Medical Association.

Critics denounced the change as a threat to the safety of elderly patients, implying that it was another way of distancing doctors from a patient’s death, reports the Daily Mirror.

But Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, told the U.K. Guardian that the revised rules “should help spare patients and their families the heartache and indignity of repeated and sometimes unnecessary resuscitation attempts. It will also mean that when a suitably experienced nurse believes that CPR will not be successful, they will be able to respond appropriately without having to wait.”

According to a report from the London-based Independent, the medical association says families often are given false hope by television dramas that depict many successful revivals of patients undergoing CPR, when in reality the success rate is much lower.

VARIOUS DATELINES
Several stories dealing with the intersection of ethics and genetics were featured in the world press last week:

• The French parliament has approved a volatile measure requiring immigrants who want to join their families in that nation to undergo mandatory DNA testing to prove that they truly are blood relatives. Swiss Radio International notes that the uproar over the measure may prompt renewed attention to similar laws, such as those in Switzerland, that are currently — but quietly — in effect.
• Britain, which allows widespread use of DNA testing by law enforcement, is starting to take a hard look at the scope of such efforts, reports Reuters. “The scale of the forensic revolution is causing unease in Britain,” according to the report, “where the government is considering casting the DNA testing net wider by allowing police to take swabs from people committing minor crimes, like dropping litter.” Even Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of DNA fingerprinting, is worried about the ethics implications of increased genetic forensics, noting that safeguard legislation is lagging behind as use of the national DNA database, which holds information on more than 6 percent of the population, expands rapidly.
• James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist famous for his role in decoding the structure of DNA in the human gene, resigned last week from his position at New York’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the wake of recent remarks questioning the intelligence of Africans, reports Newsday. While Watson was no stranger to controversy — he had been blasted for past comments about women, various ethnic groups, and overweight people — the president of the laboratory said that the latest series of remarks were “the last straw.”

VARIOUS DATELINES
A university journalism professor from North Carolina says that officials from the presidential campaign of former Sen. John Edwards tried to kill a story prepared for a student newscast.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the flap centers on a story, prepared for the newscast and circulated on the Web, questioning whether it was appropriate for Edwards to base his operations in an affluent part of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when one of his main campaign themes is fighting poverty.

University of North Carolina broadcast journalism professor Charles Tuggle says Edwards’s campaign demanded that he pull the story, which was prepared by graduate student Carla Babb.

Tuggle told local television station WITN that the Edwards campaign charged that the student reporter had misrepresented the purpose of the story.

According to the Washington Post, a campaign spokeswoman would not comment on Tuggle’s accusation other than to label it as “silly.”

“Was it what the campaign was expecting it to be? No. But I don’t know that we’re obligated as journalists to tell that the focus of a story has changed,” Tuggle told the Associated Press.

In another journalism-ethics story from last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was blasted by reporters and the White House for holding a news conference that was actually staffed by FEMA employees asking suspiciously soft questions of the agency’s deputy director as he was quizzed about the response to the California wildfires. What initially appeared to be a successful event in the administration’s effort to prove it could efficiently respond to a disaster turned sour, reports the Los Angeles Times, when the agency admitted it had used employees to ask the questions when no actual reporters showed up for the hastily arranged news conference.

FEMA officials said the incident reflected a “lapse in judgment,” but denied that there was an intent to deceive.

On Monday, the FEMA official who staged last week’s phony press conference felt further heat after a pending job offer was revoked, notes the AP.

MILAN
The ethics implications of how museums acquire and display possibly plundered antiquities are an increasingly common challenge to the institutions’ stewardship, according to a report last week from the New York Times.

Reporting from Milan, Elisabetta Povoledo reports that ownership issues are messy, noting that “even when museums draw up codes of ethics to help ensure that they won’t abet the plunder of another nation’s cultural heritage, the measures are not legally binding.”

Povoledo notes that many museums drafted codes and guidelines that mirror a 1970 UNESCO convention prohibiting illicit trade in cultural property. The International Council of Museums adopted a professional ethics code in 1986, revised in 2004, that insists on due diligence for every item brought into a collection.

But some say strict regulations have actually encouraged smuggling. The Times report quotes several officials who claim that complex laws applied to any object more than 50 years old — including the “drawing your sister did in kindergarten,” contends one — result in a brisk trade of items exported illegally or under false pretenses.

Giovanni Nistri, head of the art-theft squad of Italy’s military police, told Povoledo that from 1970 to 2006 more than 858,000 art objects originating in Italy were stolen, and only a third have been recovered. He said his squad has reclaimed nearly 700,000 illegally excavated archaeological objects, but has no reliable way of knowing how many more have been looted.

Further complicating the issue, writes Povoledo, is this ethical dilemma: “Does a country that produced cultural property have the right to it, or museum visitors around the world who get to appreciate it?”

From the American Bar Association (ABA):

“The American Bar Association today released the findings from their three-year study on state death penalty systems and called for a nationwide moratorium on executions. Based on a detailed analysis of death penalty systems in eight sample states, the ABA Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project identified key problems common to the states studied, including major racial disparities, inadequate indigent defense services and irregular clemency review processes — making their death penalty systems operate unfairly….

“While the ABA takes no position for or against the death penalty itself, since 1997 it has urged a moratorium in each jurisdiction that provides for capital punishment until the state conducts a thorough and exhaustive study to determine whether its system meets legal standards for fairness and due process.

“For the past three years, teams of local legal experts have assessed their states using 93 protocols developed by the ABA as measuring points of the due process and fairness the state provides….

“Several serious problems were found in many of the states:

• “Every state studied appears to have significant racial disparities in imposing the death penalty, particularly associated with the race of the victim, but little has been done to rectify the problem….
• “Most states have had at least one serious incident of mistakes or fraud in crime laboratories. They often do not require that crime laboratories and medical examiner offices be accredited, or that crime laboratories make their standards and procedures public. The laboratories are often seriously underfunded and do not use the most sophisticated testing procedures.
• “With respect to collection, preservation and testing of biological evidence, most states do not require preservation of the evidence through the entire legal process until the accused is either released from prison or executed. As scientific testing capability advances, evidence that could prove innocence may be destroyed. Testing statutes create onerous procedural hurdles impeding the ability of convicted persons to file for and obtain DNA testing.
• “States do not require law enforcement agencies to adopt procedures comporting with national best practices on identification and interrogation, and most states do not require law enforcement agencies to videotape or audiotape custodial interrogations in murder cases….
• “Some states fail to provide for appointment of defense counsel in post-conviction proceedings, and all states fail to provide for appointment of counsel in clemency proceedings. Capital indigent defense is generally significantly underfunded, and compensation paid to appointed capital defense attorneys is often inadequate. Many states require only minimal training and experience for defense counsel in capital cases.
• “Some states do not require a meaningful proportionality review to determine whether death sentences are imposed on similarly situated defendants and few, if any, maintain databases adequate to achieve such a review.
• “With respect to post-conviction review, many states provide unreasonably short time periods in which to petition the courts for review, and most states allow judges in such proceedings to adopt findings of fact and conclusions of law proposed by one party, potentially undermining the judge’s exercise of independent judgment. Some states assign post-conviction review of whether errors were made at trial to the same judge who presided at trial, and many states make it difficult to obtain discovery, or evidentiary hearings….

“With more than 413,000 members, the American Bar Association is the largest voluntary professional membership organization in the world. As the national voice of the legal profession, the ABA works to improve the administration of justice, promotes programs that assist lawyers and judges in their work, accredits law schools, provides continuing legal education, and works to build public understanding around the world of the importance of the rule of law.”

“Three things too much, and three too little are pernicious to man: to speak much, and know little; to spend much, and have little; to presume much, and be worth little.”

– Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright, 1547-1616)

It’s no secret that Washington these days is a deeply polarized place. So the bipartisan cordiality that recently greeted Michael Mukasey — President Bush’s nominee to succeed Alberto Gonzales as attorney general of the United States — was a rare and remarkable respite. At his October 17 hearing, the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were clearly impressed with Judge Mukasey’s record as a New York federal judge pursuing high-profile terrorist cases. They also were comforted by his assertions about civil rights and the need to avoid the politicization of a Department of Justice still staggering from the district attorney dismissal scandal.

These are important points. But far more significant was a pointer in his opening statement about his judicial philosophy. He agreed with the millions of Americans who, following 9/11, understand as never before the importance of “the gathering of intelligence to defend us from those who believe it is their duty to make war on us.” But he also agreed with the millions who, following the outcry about the detention and rendition of terrorist suspects, understand that “protecting civil liberties, and people’s confidence that those liberties are protected, is a part of protecting national security.”

That liberty-versus-security standoff — the need to protect individuals while defending the nation — might strike many observers as a paradox, a conundrum, an intellectual cul-de-sac. For Mukasey, it is part of a larger concept of right versus right. To make his point, he drew from the writings of Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson, whom he called “a great attorney general, perhaps the greatest to serve in the modern era.” Jackson, who served as the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials, noted in a 1951 speech that “the issue between authority and liberty is not between a right and a wrong — that never presents a dilemma. The dilemma is because the conflict is between two rights, each in its own way important.”

In those words Mukasey puts his finger on one of the greatest challenges of our times. At issue is not simply the liberty-versus-security debate — although for Mukasey, as for Jackson before him, that’s an effective example. No, the ultimate challenge is the mindset that imagines all problems to be conflicts between “a right and a wrong.” What paralyzes Washington these days isn’t terrorism. Nor is it immigration, abortion, subprime loans, health insurance for children, poppies in Afghanistan, nuclear power in Iran, or anything else on the nation’s agenda. The inertial down-drag in the system comes from a conceptual framework that sees every issue as a black-and-white, right-versus-wrong problem. When you see the world through those glasses, the disharmony and polarization of politics is not only predictable but inevitable. After all, if I’m absolutely right and you’re dead wrong, why should I bother talking with you?

The irony of last week’s hearing, then, is that the senators, as if on cue, took their tone from Mukasey’s insistence on seeing life as “the conflict between two rights, each in its own way important.” This simple framing conception — seeing life through the lens of right versus right — has a long lineage. These are the conflicts Henry Clay had in mind. “All legislation is founded upon the principle of human concession,” the great orator asserted a century before Jackson’s speech. “Let him who elevates himself above humanity … say, if he pleases, ‘I never will compromise’: but let no one who is not above the frailties of our common nature distain compromise.” These are also the conflicts that Jackson’s contemporary, John F. Kennedy, described when, quoting Clay in his book Profiles in Courage, he concluded that there are “few if any issues where all the truth and all the right and all the angels are on one side.”

Why is it, then, that such conflicts are so glibly misread today as right-versus-wrong? Is it the influence of talking-head TV and rant radio, where high-decibel diatribe passes for debate? Is it the pressure of a pervasive fundamentalism — not only theological but political and economic — that camps out in self-satisfied confidence on one side of a complex issue and proclaims itself the possessor of all truth? Is it a fear of the unknown, causing citizens to cling to whatever smacks of certainty and authority? Is it the lure of an information culture, content with the fuzzy intimations of a visual media rather than an exacting verbal clarity as practiced by Clay, Jackson, and Kennedy? Is it the overlay of a scientific framework that, seeing reality as a polarity of positive and negative charges, seizes that analogy to describe the intricacies of human relationships?

Whatever the reason, Mukasey’s simple comment may help click the right-wrong frame into its proper right-right perspective. If he were to bring into the upper reaches of government that one idea — that right versus wrong “never presents a dilemma” — his tenure as an attorney general in the waning months of the Bush administration will have been well worth the effort.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

“I like to compare the U.S. to the European settlers of the past century. The European settler said, ‘I am coming to liberate, to develop, to modernize.’ But after a while he stumbled upon realities and facts that he did not know before and that could not be ignored. This is what is happening to the U.S. today, hence the change in its policies, from an ideological agenda to a pragmatic one. They are looking to protect themselves and their interests.”

– Sateh Noureddine, a columnist at As-Safir, a pro-Syrian newspaper in Lebanon, talking to the New York Times in a piece examining the criticism that the United States ignores human rights abuses in Egypt due to the country’s strategic value as a political ally

WASHINGTON
What may be the dominant ethics issue of the year resurfaced again last week during the confirmation hearings of Michael Mukasey, the nominee for U.S. attorney general, when he was quizzed on the limits and definitions of torture.

While Mukasey contended that torture is unconstitutional and he would not endorse it as attorney general, he would not comment on specific “harsh” interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, a procedure that involves pouring water over the face of a prisoner, simulating the effect of drowning, UPI reports.

Mukasey’s responses during his confirmation hearings before a Senate panel are being closely watched worldwide, reports the Christian Science Monitor, because the appearance that the United States has relaxed standards governing the treatment of prisoners since September 11 has damaged the nation’s reputation abroad.

Mukasey said he was not familiar with the nuances of waterboarding, and said it is difficult for him to define which specific techniques should be classified as cruel, inhumane, or degrading, reports the McClatchy newspaper syndicate.

“We have to also recognize that when we’re talking about coercive methods of interrogation, this is not a matter of choosing pleasant alternatives over unpleasant alternatives,” he said, according to the McClatchy report. “It’s a choice among bad alternatives.”

Mukasey also raised eyebrows when he suggested that President Bush could ignore statutes on government surveillance during wartime, reports the Washington Post.

The Post notes, however, that while several of the exchanges during the second and final day of Mukasey’s hearing were tense, most observers predict he will have little trouble being confirmed once the nomination moves to the floor for a full Senate vote.

PHOENIX
In a case that raised First Amendment, privacy, and legal-ethics issues, two news executives were briefly jailed after their paper published an article disclosing details of a grand jury subpoena.

Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, who published a story in last Thursday’s edition of the Phoenix New Times that described details of a subpoena they received from a local grand jury, were arrested and later released, according to the newspaper trade journal Editor & Publisher.

Charges against them were dropped later.

The case centered on the Maricopa County grand jury’s investigation into the newspaper’s decision three years ago to publish the home address of sheriff Joe Arpaio, reports USA Today. The story dealt with the sheriff’s real estate holdings.

The Phoenix New Times, part of a chain of weeklies that includes New York’s Village Voice, was subject to a possible felony claim under a state law that criminalizes publishing the home address of a law enforcement official on the Internet, reports Tucson television station KVOA.

The law does not prohibit publishing the same information in print.

The case took an ominous turn, according to the Village Voice, when the grand jury investigating the publication of the sheriff’s address asked not only for information on documents and witnesses involved in the original story, but also for the Internet protocol (IP) addresses of the site’s visitors. IP addresses generally are traceable to individual computers.

The Arizona Republic reported that in addition to dropping the original case as well as the subsequent charges of releasing grand jury information, the special prosecutor handling the case has been fired.

VARIOUS DATELINES
A recent report on how companies worldwide are victimized by some sort of economic crime — from bribery to accounting fraud — says that the situation remains one of the most problematic issues for business and that levels of economic crime generally continue to hold steady or increase. The report figured in headlines from three continents:

• Corruption in Russian business has worsened over the last two years and is draining the economy rapidly, according to the survey from the accountancy group PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Reuters’ Moscow bureau notes that the report comes shortly after the announcement of a new anti-graft initiative by president Vladimir Putin and prime minister Viktor Zubkov, part of the run-up to a parliamentary election in December and a presidential election in March.
• The same survey indicates that Canadian companies fell victim to economic crimes at a surprisingly high rate, with the nation’s increase outpacing the global average. About two-thirds of the Canadian firms surveyed have strengthened existing controls or created new procedures to fight corporate crime, reports the Toronto Star. One expert interviewed by the Star speculated that the apparent increase in crime may be the result simply of better reporting in the wake of intense press coverage of recent corporate misdeeds.
• In the United Kingdom, corruption and bribery continue to cost business millions of dollars, reports London-based Accountancy Age. In fact, the incidence of corruption and bribery has doubled in the past two years. The rate of economic crime in the Britain was twice the global average and more than three times the average in Western Europe.
• South Africa saw one of the steepest increases in corporate crime, with reported incidents nearly tripling since 2005, reports the Port Elizabeth Herald. The PriceWaterhouseCoopers report adds to the nation’s woes, according to the Herald story, because South Africa also has one of the world’s worst murder rates and spiraling violent crime.
• Economic-crime losses in the United States showed only modest increases, but one striking finding, notes the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report, is a sharp increase in incidents of intellectual property theft U.S. companies claim are perpetrated by China.

KARACHI
A long-term political squabble that started over allegations of corruption evolved into bloodshed last week as Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s main opposition leader, returned from exile to a homecoming parade — only to confront a bomb attack that killed more than 130 of her supporters.

Bhutto was unhurt.

While stopping short of blaming the military-backed government of plotting the attack, Bhutto urged general Pervez Musharraf, the country’s current ruler, to clamp down on militant groups, the Financial Times reports.

TIME magazine’s Karachi correspondent Aryn Baker reports that many international leaders say they believe that al Qaeda was behind the attacks. But Baker’s report notes that many in Pakistan are speculating about why the government provided such poor security for Bhutto’s homecoming.

Bhutto was deposed as prime minister in 1996 and fled the country in 1999 to escape prosecution on a variety of corruption charges, all of which she denied. Many of the allegations involved her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who became known as “Mr. Ten Percent” during his wife’s rule because of rumors that he extorted that amount from anyone who wanted to do business with the government, according to an analysis from National Public Radio.

The still-popular Bhutto eventually brokered a return to the country after Musharraf’s popularity plunged and his control of dissidents eroded, according to the London Daily Telegraph.