Weekend News Digest

Educators reacting to the findings questioned any suggestion that today’s young people are less honest than previous generations, but several agreed that intensified pressures are prompting many students to cut corners.

“The competition is greater, the pressures on kids have increased dramatically,” said Mel Riddle of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. “They have opportunities their predecessors didn’t have (to cheat). The temptation is greater.”

Neither the army nor Thailand’s revered king have stepped in to resolve the crisis – or offered the firm backing that Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat needs to resolve the leadership vacuum.

The problem runs deeper than the airport closures, which have stranded up to 100,000 travelers, strangled the key tourism industry and affected plane schedules worldwide. Political violence has added to the sense of drift bordering on anarchy that pervades the country’s administration.

At the same time, voters rejected a proposal to decriminalize marijuana.

Sixty-eight percent of the 2,264,968 voters casting ballots approved making the heroin program permanent. It has been credited with reducing crime and improving the health and daily lives of addicts since it began in 1994.

“See these plants? They can tolerate the cold,” Zeng says as he walks through a checkerboard of test fields sown with different rice varieties on the outskirts of Kunming, capital of southwestern China’s Yunnan province.

“We can extract the cold-tolerant gene from this plant and use it in a genetically manipulated variety to improve its cold tolerance,” Zeng says.

Gay marriage is not a civil right, opponents counter, insisting that minority status comes from who you are rather than what you do.

The gay rights movement entered a new era when Barack Obama was elected the first black president the same day that voters in California and Florida passed referendums to prevent gays and lesbians from marrying, while Arizonans turned down civil unions and Arkansans said no to adoptions by same-sex couples.

Early results from the Black Friday weekend, which begins one day after U.S. Thanksgiving, showed that sales grew both in stores and online.

Sales on Black Friday, which once marked the day retailers would turn a profit for the year, rose 3 percent to $10.6 billion, according to tracking firm ShopperTrak. That was slower than an 8.3 percent rise in 2007.

The Iraqi Central Criminal Court ruled there was no evidence against Ibrahim Jassam Mohammed, and ordered that the U.S. military release him from Camp Cropper prison near Baghdad airport.

Iraqi prosecutors acknowledged in remarks included in the court ruling that there was a lack of evidence, and said they were closing the case against Jassam. A copy of the court order was supplied to a lawyer working for Reuters.

The comments came after Iraq’s influential top Shi’ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani expressed reservations about the pact which paves the way for U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraqi towns by mid-2009, and leave the country by end-2011.

Iraq’s parliament approved pact last week but said it should be put to a national referendum by the end of July.

Gunmen captured the MV Faina on September 24, with its cargo of T-72 tanks, grenade launchers and ammunition, and demanded $20 million in ransom.

“They have reached a deal but are still discussing the modalities of releasing the ship, crew and cargo,” said Andrew Mwangura of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Program.

Violence has escalated this year in Afghanistan, the bloodiest period since Taliban’s ouster in 2001, raising doubts about the prospects for stability despite increasing numbers of foreign troops in the country.

“It was a suicide attack on the German embassy car,” Ali Shah Paktiawal, a senior Kabul police official told reporters near the scene.

Rival ethnic and religious mobs have burned homes, shops, mosques and churches in fighting triggered by a disputed local election in a city at the crossroads of Nigeria’s Muslim north and Christian south. It is the country’s worst unrest for years.

Murtala Sani Hashim, who has been registering the dead as they are brought to the city’s main mosque, told Reuters he had listed 367 bodies and more were arriving. Ten corpses wrapped in blankets, two of them infants, lay behind him.

Home Minister Shivraj Patil said he took “moral responsibility” for the assault by heavily-armed Islamic militants, which left at least 172 people dead and transformed parts of Mumbai into a war zone for three days.

India’s powerful national security adviser M.K. Narayanan also submitted his resignation, officials said, but it was not clear if it had been accepted.

“It is a stabilisation and development programme, because Poland is a country that is still developing,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk told reporters

At the same time, Polish Finance Minister Jan Rostowski said his department was lowering its economic growth forecast for 2009 to 3.7 percent, compared with the previous outlook of 4.8 percent.

Speculation is growing in Geneva that Lamy will call ministers before the end of the year in yet another attempt to finally clinch a deal on global trade liberalisation after seven years of impasse, false starts and disagreements.

The target is to get texts by the end of the coming week, trade sources told journalists.

Ex-communist Slovakia is fast becoming Europe’s Detroit: a humming automotive haven where – for now, at least – there’s no sign of the crisis gripping America’s Big Three.

“We’re talking about adding jobs, not eliminating them,” says Jun-Bum Park, general manager of Kia Motors Slovakia, which opened the sprawling euro1 billion ($1.36 billion) complex in Zilina in December 2006.

The polls have been reliable in past elections, and both show the leftist bloc with roughly 36 percent. But the party, which includes former communist leaders, does not appear to have enough support to take power outright.

Anxiety over the global financial crisis was a major issue, and the Social Democrats promised to spread the wealth around.

Officials from Tasmania state’s Parks and Wildlife Service rushed Sunday in four-wheel-drive vehicles to the remote site at Sandy Cape after the long-finned pilot whales were spotted by air a day earlier.

A helicopter crew that arrived late Saturday found about a dozen of the whales injured but alive, said Warwick Brennan, a spokesman for the service.

At an April NATO summit held in Bucharest, France and Germany, worried about the reaction of key energy supplier Russia, blocked Membership Action Plans (MAP) — also called roadmaps — for the former Soviet states.

However, under U.S. pressure, NATO leaders promised them eventual NATO membership and to review their cases in December, though Germany’s foreign minister said in an interview published on Sunday his position had not changed since Bucharest.

Two years ago, local authorities investigated the self-made 39-year-old billionaire in connection with a loan deal involving his investment company, Eagle Property Group. Huang was later cleared of any wrongdoing.

The current probe of Huang, the chairman and controlling shareholder of China’s top electronics retailer GOME — known as China’s Best Buy, the top U.S. electronics chain — throws the spotlight on another Chinese tale of rags-to-riches fame.

Nkunda, whose forces have routed government troops and gained swathes of territory in North Kivu province in the east of Democratic Republic of Congo since launching a new offensive in August, has repeatedly demanded negotiations.

Nkunda said he had been told by the U.N. special envoy, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, that Kinshasa had accepted the principle of talks.

The UN Security Council has approved an additional 3,000 peacekeepers for the Congo mission, but the deployment “is going to take some time,” Karel De Gucht told Belgium’s VRT television.

“For that reason, the United Nations hopes that a European military force could come and fill in the gap during this period,” De Gucht said.

Some are cautious in their criticisms. Others – ones who generally are tied to political parties that fought the pact – forcefully condemn the treaty.

Their comments filtered in Sunday as Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki met with U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. Ray Odierno , commander of multinational forces in Iraq , to plan for the treaty’s implementation.