Other results noted by the institute included:

— More then eight in 10 students — 83 percent — admitted that they lied to a parent about an issue of some importance, while 43 percent of the students in public and private schools said that they have lied to save money.

— In a 2006 survey, 60 percent of the students said they cheated on at least one test and 35 percent cheated two or more times. This year, the numbers rose to 64 percent and 38 percent on the same issues.

— The Internet makes plagiarism easy, with 36 percent of the students confessing that vice — up from 33 percent in 2004.

— Self-esteem is not a problem, since 93 percent of the students reported that their ethics and character were satisfactory and, in a popular quote from the survey, 77 percent said that “when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know.”

Read it all.

Jim Murphy, the Scottish Secretary, strongly criticised the Act of Settlement, adding to pressure inside the Government for the law to be changed or scrapped.

Mr Straw, the Justice Secretary, earlier this year signalled that ministers are looking at abolishing the 307-year-old Act of Settlement because it is “antiquated” and discriminates against non-Protestants.

Repealing or amending the act could also pave the way for a first-born daughter of Prince William to succeed him as monarch by ending the practice of primogeniture where male heirs are given priority in the succession.

Read it all.

“In 2004, the standing committee had expressed support for the work of the Anglican Communion Network in providing a place within The Episcopal Church were those of a more conservative outlook could find a place of encouragement for their mission and ministry within the church,” the standing committee said. “As the Diocese of the Rio Grande looks toward the future, and particularly as it works toward electing its next bishop, the standing committee felt increasingly that the work of the Anglican Communion Network no longer served the constructive purposes hoped for in the 2004 resolution.

“The support of the Anglican Communion Network for the creation of a separate Anglican church in North America, announced on Dec. 3, served as the catalyst for the action of the standing committee at its meeting this week.”

Read it all

The former Prime Minister is said to have given a “dynamite” interview about his religious beliefs, how they influenced his politics and why he decided to leave the Church of England and convert to Catholicism.

The 10-minute discourse will be screened on this Sunday’s BBC One programme Christmas Voices, which is presented by the singer Lesley Garrett.

Read it all.

The ravages of time and neglect have left Canterbury Cathedral, a World Heritage Site and one of the world’s best known Anglican church buildings, as an endangered structure in need of a massive injection of funds – writes Trevor Grundy.

The Cathedral gained global fame in English literary masterpieces such as the 14th century plays of Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales”, and the 20th century play by T.S. Eliot, ‘Murder in the Cathedral’.

The public relations manager of the Save Canterbury Cathedral Appeal, Shelley Nye, said 9 million British pounds (US$13.3 million) of the total 50 million pounds needed has been raised, and the campaign will expand nationally and internationally in 2009.

Read it all.

The United States, of course, leads the way in individual charitable giving, which partly explains why the country is so prosperous. Several of the speakers pointed out that American citizens gave around $300 billion to charity last year, more than the entire income of Sweden, Denmark or Norway. Mary Ann Glendon, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, said such generosity has been made possible thanks to public and private efforts, not least President George Bush’s initiative to encourage faith-based institutions.

Ambassador Glendon wanted to co-host the conference to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She recalled how the United States and other countries successfully lobbied the Declaration framers to consider a space for “caritas” in civil society so as not to dampen private initiative or to give too much power to the state. The Soviet Union had wanted to make the state the primary guarantor of all social and economic rights.

Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes, president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, referred to Benedict XVI’s encyclical “Deus Caritas Est” in his message to the conference, delivered in his absence by Cor Unum’s secretary, Monsignor Karel Kasteel. The Pope stressed that “caritas” is always needed, even in the most just society, but that what is required, above all, is holiness. “It is not charity that makes us saints,” Cardinal Cordes reminded the conference participants, “but holiness that makes us truly charitable.”

Read it all.

More room to fall?

For every $100 spent on a house in 1950 the investment rose slightly through 2002, then soared to about $192 in 2006, adjusting for inflation. Then credit dried up, and the bust began.

Rick Wallick moved into a new, three-bedroom $200,000 home in Maricopa, Ariz., in October 2005. Today, the home is worth $80,000.

The disabled software engineer stopped making mortgage payments this month. His $70,000 down payment is now worthless. His dream house will be foreclosed on next year.

“We’re so far underwater it’s not funny,” says Wallick, 57, who had to return to his original home in Oregon to care for a sick family member and tend to his own medical problems.

Read it all.

THE NEW Anglican province in North America proposed by a coali­tion of conservative Anglican groups in the United States and Canada published its draft constitu­tion and canons in Wheaton, Illi­nois, last week (News, 28 November).

The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), formed by the Common Cause Partnership, says it has 700 congregations and about 100,000 members. It “will seek to represent orthodox North Amer­icans in the councils of the Anglican Communion”. It will have an Arch­bishop ”” initially the Rt Revd Bob Duncan, former Bishop of Pitts­burgh, and the Moderator of Com­mon Cause.

At a press conference on Wednes­day of last week in Wheaton, Bishop Duncan told the gathering: “The Lord is displacing the Episco­pal Church.”

In the new provincial structure, congregations and clergy are related together “in a diocese, cluster, or network, whether regional or affinity-based, united by a bishop”. These are defined in the canons as consisting of a minimum of 12 congregations with an Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) of at least 50 each, and a collective ASA of at least 1000. They choose which bishop they want to be under: “A duly ordained male presbyter of at least 35 years of age.”

Read it all.

[Peter] Frank hopes the Anglican Church in North America will heal some of the breaches within the Church, but acknowledges unspecified threats from unnamed groups as well as lawsuits.

“Last year, the Episcopal church spent $2 million on lawsuits to reclaim parish properties (from disaffected congregations.) We can’t be sure how those lawsuits will come out. There are some lawsuits pending and some settled favorably for the congregations. Some congregations have put the keys (to their church properties) on the desk and walked away. You just don’t sue people back in the church.”

In spite of the troubled birth of the Anglican Church in North America, Frank says the new body will continue to “move against the trend” and maintain the traditions of what it means to be Anglican: maintenance of the distinctive characteristics of the English reformation, a high view of scripture, and a deep appreciation of church tradition.

Read it all.

Abuse of prescription drugs continues to be a major problem among teenagers although fewer of them are smoking cigarettes, according to the 2008 Monitoring the Future survey released today.

The survey, which has been conducted for 33 years, found that nearly 10% of high school seniors reported nonmedical use of Vicodin and 4.7% reported abusing OxyContin. Both are strong opioid pain pills. Seven of the top 10 drugs abused by high school seniors were prescription or over-the-counter medications.

Read it all.

The Archbishop of Canterbury will not block the creation of a third Anglican province in North America, sources familiar with Dr. Rowan Williams’ Dec 5 meeting with five traditionalist archbishops, tell The Church of England Newspaper.

However, the archbishop will not give it his endorsement either, arguing his office does not have the legal authority to make, or un-make, Anglicans.

On Dec 5, five members of the Gafcon primates council: Archbishops Benjamin Nzimbi of Kenya, Peter Akinola of Nigeria, Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda, Gregory Venables of the Southern Cone, and Henry Orombi of Uganda met with Dr. Williams in Canterbury for approximately five hours to discuss the current state of affairs within the Communion.

In a half day meeting interspersed with prayer and lunch the archbishops had a “full and frank” discussion of the issues, sources familiar with the proceedings said. “There was no indaba-ding on Friday,” one senior Gafcon bishop told CEN, referring to the ”˜Indaba’ process of directed listening used at the 2008 Lambeth Conference. The Gafcon bishop said the conversation was a direct and forthright discussion of all of the presenting issues.

Read it all.

Bernard L. Madoff, a legend among Wall Street traders, was arrested on Thursday morning by federal agents and charged with criminal securities fraud stemming from his company’s money management business.

The arrest and criminal complaint were confirmed just before 6 p.m. Thursday by Lev L. Dassin, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, and Mark Mershon, the assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

According to the complaint, Mr. Madoff advised colleagues at the firm on Wednesday that his investment advisory business was “all just one big lie” that was “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme” that, by his estimate, had lost $50 billion over many years.

Read it all.

Senate negotiations for a U.S. automaker bailout plan collapsed, in a blow to General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, which may run out of cash early next year.

“It’s over with,” Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the Senate floor in Washington. “I dread looking at Wall Street tomorrow. It’s not going to be a pleasant sight.”

The Senate began taking a procedural vote on a House-passed plan, though Reid said he didn’t expect it to get the required 60 votes.

“Millions of Americans, not only the autoworkers, but people who sell cars, car dealerships, people who work on cars, are going to be directly impacted,” said Reid. “It’s going to be a very, very bad Christmas for a lot of people as a result of what takes place here tonight.”

Read it all.

In Great Falls, Va., a Washington suburb, homeowner Rachel Rothstein…realized times had changed when she spotted her neighbor at work in his yard the other day. “He was putting down seed and fertilizer,” says Ms. Rothstein. “It struck me. I have never seen him out there. It was always the lawn service.”

From a front page article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

“Without giving specific names, most of the significant American banks, the larger banks, are bankrupt, totally bankrupt,” said [Jim] Rogers, who is now a private investor.

“What is outrageous economically and is outrageous morally is that normally in times like this, people who are competent and who saw it coming and who kept their powder dry go and take over the assets from the incompetent,” he said. “What’s happening this time is that the government is taking the assets from the competent people and giving them to the incompetent people and saying, now you can compete with the competent people. It is horrible economics.”

Read it all.

The prospects of a $14 billion government rescue of the American auto industry seemed to vaporize on Thursday morning as the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, spoke out forcefully against the bill, effectively dooming its chances despite the urgings of the White House.

In a speech on the Senate floor, Mr. McConnell said he and other Republicans had drawn a clear distinction between the Treasury’s $700 billion economic stabilization, which they helped pass in October, and the proposal to aid the American automakers, which he said raised questions about which industries or individuals deserve help.

“A lot of struggling Americans are wondering where their bailout is,” Mr. McConnell declared. Although Mr. McConnell voiced support of an alternative plan that was developed by Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, it seemed unlikely that there was any possibility of compromise at this late point in the year, although some Congressional aides still expressed hope and said talks would continue.

Read it all.

Curiosity aroused, I contacted the site’s owners to find out what was going on. They told me that, since September, the number of London-based males in the financial sector registering had risen by nearly 300 per cent. It seems the colder the market for jobs, the hotter the market for adultery….

The founders of the website like to argue that, by providing a well-behaved marketplace for adultery, they are actually creating domestic stability. Seventy per cent of Illicit Encounters’ clients claim to be attracted to adultery as an alternative to divorce, not as a precursor to it. This may not be altogether laughable but it seems a little early to draw any conclusion one way or another.

However, it’s not too early to draw three other conclusions from my month on the site. The first is that people who are still in work seem to have an inordinate amount of spare time from nine to five. Second is that everyone lies: they understate their ages and overstate their attractiveness, gym attendance, good humour and so on.

Read it all.

BTW, while…[the] folks in the Big Media churned out hundreds of thousands of words…waxing euphoric about the prospect for enhanced back office clearing of CDS contracts, the real issue is the festering credit situation in the front office. Truth is that the DTCC and the other dealers, working at the behest of Mr. Geithner, Gerry Corrigan and many others, have largely fixed the operational issues dogging the CDS markets. The danger of CDS is not a systemic blowup – though that will come soon enough. It is the normal operation of the now electronically enabled CDS market wherein lies the threat to the entire global financial system, this via the huge drain in liquidity illustrated above as CDS contracts are triggered by default events.

The only way to deal with this ridiculous Ponzi scheme is bankruptcy. The way to start that healing process, in our view, is by the Fed emulating the FDIC’s treatment of DSL, withdrawing financial support for AIG and pushing the company into the arms of the bankruptcy court. The eager buyers for the AIG insurance units, cleansed of liability via a receivership, will stretch around the block.

By embracing Geithner, President-elect Barack Obama is endorsing the ill-advised scheme to support AIG directed by Hank Paulson et al at Goldman Sachs and executed by Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke. News reports have already documented the ties between GS and AIG, and the backroom machinations by Paulson to get the deal done. This scheme to stay AIG’s resolution cannot possibly work and when it does collapse, Barak Obama and his administration will wear the blame due through their endorsement of Tim Geithner.

Read it carefully and read it all.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who opposes the proposed bailout of U.S. automakers, says the companies should go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which would force them to reorganize. He says the proposed “car czar” to oversee the automakers’ restructuring is a “ridiculous” idea.

Listen to it all from NPR.

State economists cut $229.5 million from state revenue estimates Wednesday, citing dire economic projections through the end of the budget year in June.

In making the additional 3.5 percent cut, the Board of Economic Advisors said the state unemployment rate could reach 14 percent between now and July. That would mean an additional 130,000 people looking for work ”” 20,000 already are ”” and no longer paying state income taxes.

Wednesday’s cuts, coupled with a November cut creating a $138 million deficit, mean a state budget panel meeting this morning could be forced to slash $367 million ”” or more ”” from the state budget. Since June, revenue estimates have been reduced by $797 million, or 11.2 percent.

Read it all.

State Supreme Court Judge Ferris D. Lebous will be asked Friday to decide whether a local church or a regional diocese owns property on Conklin Avenue, which is occupied by Church of the Good Shepherd.

The decision, whether rendered Friday or more likely reserved by Lebous for a future date, could be a precedent in ongoing legal disputes in New York state and elsewhere between the Episcopal Church and individual congregations that have withdrawn from the national denomination.

That split came when V. Gene Robinson, a self-avowed homosexual, was ordained a bishop in 2003.

Read it all.

Once diversity is received as a positive fact, it is necessary to make persons accept not only the existence of the other’s culture, but also the desire to be enriched with it. Addressing Catholics, my predecessor, the Servant of God Paul VI, enunciated his profound conviction in these terms: “The Church must enter into dialogue with the world in which she lives. The Church becomes word, the Church becomes message, the Church becomes conversation” (“Ecclesiam Suam,” No. 67). We live in what is usually called a “plural world,” characterized by the speed of communications, the mobility of peoples and their economic, political and cultural interdependence. Precisely in this, perhaps dramatic hour, though unfortunately many Europeans seem to forget Europe’s Christian roots, the latter are alive and should trace the path and nourish the hope of millions of citizens who share the same values.

Believers should always be willing to promote initiatives of intercultural and interreligious dialogue….[but] To be authentic, dialogue must avoid yielding to relativism and syncretism and be animated by sincere respect for others and by a generous spirit of reconciliation and fraternity.

Read it carefully and read it all.

Citing the risk of massive job loss, the House voted Wednesday to loan US automakers $14 billion in return for a direct government hand in restructuring the ailing industry. But the biggest hurdle to clearing the bailout bill lies ahead in the US Senate, where the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster and pass the bill are in doubt.

Although the legislation includes protections for taxpayers ­and the White House has signed off on it, many Senate Republicans say they’re not convinced that the loans will be repaid or that the plan will produce a more viable domestic auto industry.

“People realize this is an incredibly weak bill. It’s the product of an administration that wants to kick the can down the road and let someone else deal with it, and it has minimal, very minimal, support in our caucus,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R) of Tennessee, after a GOP caucus meeting on the bailout on Wednesday.

Read it all.

Check it out (pdf).

Over the course of 11 days in November, the soft-spoken monk known as Jonah saw his life change in ways he hadn’t dreamed of.

Consecrated first as bishop of Forth Worth and then days later elected as metropolitan of the 100,000-member Orthodox Church in America, he went from being an abbot to being metropolitan of one of the most prominent U.S. branches of the global Orthodox Christian communion.

Born James Paffhausen, the 49-year-old Chicago native was baptized in the Episcopal Church. He converted to Orthodoxy as a college student, was ordained a priest and then became a monk, and founded a monastery now located in Manton, Calif., as well other missions in California and Hawaii.

Read it all.

Could California pastor Rick Warren possibly be everywhere at once?

It sure seems like it. There may be no escaping Warren’s new campaign to stamp his vision of civil Christian discourse and social action on world culture.

You probably just saw him, maybe in August when he interviewed both presidential candidates on moral and social questions at his televised Saddleback Civil Forum.

Read it all.

The survey of 1,000 adults was taken Saturday through Monday and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The poll showed that most of those surveyed favored increasing government intervention in the economy, and half blamed lack of regulation for many of the nation’s current woes.

About two-thirds back tighter regulation of banks and financial institutions, and half said the federal government should take an ownership stake in banks and other industries to save the private sector.

Asked whether such moves would constitute a step toward socialism, about half said yes, but just 20% said that this worried them “a lot.”

Read it all.

President-elect Barack Obama says he will try to “reboot America’s image” among the world’s Muslims and will follow tradition by using his entire name ”” Barack Hussein Obama ”” in his swearing-in ceremony.

The U.S. image globally has taken a deep hit during President George W. Bush’s two terms in office, primarily because of opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, harsh interrogation of prisoners, the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and mistreatment of inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Obama promised during his campaign that one of his top priorities would be to work to repair America’s reputation worldwide, and that one element of that effort would be a speech delivered in a Muslim capital.

Read it all.

The European Union (EU) wants this week’s 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to also mark the expansion of the document to condemn the criminalization of same-sex relations.

A delegation from the EU hopes to convince the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday to formally condemn treating homosexuals as criminals. The proposed declaration is intended to pressure the 80 countries that still consider same-sex relations a crime, including a handful, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh, where the punishment is death.

Although all 27 member states of the EU support the proposal, resistance has come from the Vatican, which has criticized the declaration as a Trojan horse intended to eventually open the door to gay marriage. Most European countries do not recognize gay marriage, including the document’s main sponsor, France. Only Spain and the Netherlands allow same-sex marriage, although 13 member states recognize some form of civil unions.

Read it all.

The strange part of …[the New York Times] account is the statement that this move “threatens the fragile unity of the Anglican Communion.” That fragile unity was shattered by the actions of more liberal churches in North America to bless same-sex unions, ordain homosexual ministers, and elect an openly-homosexual bishop. The lack of unity is what has prompted the establishment of this new denomination.

Indeed, this division among the Anglicans and related national churches can be traced directly back to the Anglican Communion’s failure to establish and maintain doctrinal boundaries and a clear affirmation of biblical authority. Liberals and conservatives have been increasingly at odds over a host of issues related to biblical authority.

The action of the American church, the Episcopal Church USA, to elect and consecrate an openly-homosexual man as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003 set the stage for what now appears to be a schism in the church.

Read it all.