SusanG at dailykos links to this report in The Australian, with the headline "Putin 'copied uni thesis'."
THE career of Russian President Vladimir Putin was built at least in part on a lie, according to US researchers.
A new study of an economics thesis written by Mr Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text.
Mr Putin was labelled a plagiarist at the weekend after a pair of researchers at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, established that the President's academic credentials were based on a dissertation he had lifted in part verbatim from the Russian translation of a management study written by two professors at the University of Pittsburgh in 1978.
…
The embarrassing revelation that the former KGB agent may have cheated and lied about his qualifications follows a long search by US scholars for evidence of the President's academic prowess. A copy of the thesis was eventually found in the electronic files of a Moscow technical library.
According to Clifford G. Gaddy, a senior fellow at Brookings, 16 of the 20 pages that open a key section of Mr Putin's work were copied either word for word or with minute alterations from a management study, Strategic Planning and Policy, by US professors William King and David Cleland. The study was translated into Russian by a KGB-related institute in the early 1990s.
The Washington Times reported that six diagrams and tables from the 218-page thesis also appeared to "mimic" similar charts in the US work.
The newspaper quoted Mr Gaddy as saying: "There's no question in my mind that this would be plagiarism."
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and there's this final paragraph:
While plagiarism has come to be regarded in the US as a fatal blot on any local politician's copybook - senator Joe Biden has never recovered from allegations that he stole sections of a 1988 speech by Neil Kinnock, the former British Labour leader - the issue is not taken especially seriously in Russia, which is second only to China as a producer of pirated copyright goods.
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