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26. mars 2006
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Researchers claim that Vladimir Putin's PhD thesis was obtained through fraud.
The career of President Vladimir Putin of Russia was built at least in part on a lie, according to US researchers. A new study of an economics thesis written by Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text.
Putin was labelled a plagiarist yesterday after a pair of researchers at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, established that the Russian 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. [...]
According to Clifford G Gaddy, a senior fellow at Brookings, 16 of the 20 pages that open a key section of Putin’s work were copied either word for word or with minute alterations from a management study, Strategic Planning and Policy, written 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 yesterday that six diagrams and tables from the 218-page thesis also appeared to “mimic” similar charts in the US work. The newspaper quoted Gaddy as saying: “There’s no question in my mind that this would be plagiarism.”
The revelation is probably not going to hurt Putin a lot in his homeland, as it will be dismissed as American propaganda. Also, plagiarism is not exactly considered a serious crime in Russia.
At any rate, nobody can deny that Vladimir Putin deserves a PhD in applied politics, they way he has completely out-maneuvered and pummeled his opposition to gain total control of Russian politics.
10:11:39 PM 
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An Afghan court has decided to dismiss the case against convert Abdul Rahman, who risked a death penalty for apostasy against Islam:
"The court dismissed today the case against Abdul Rahman for a lack of information and a lot of legal gaps in the case," the official said Sunday, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
"The decision about his release will be taken possibly tomorrow," the official added. "They don't have to keep him in jail while the attorney general is looking into the case."
Abdul Wakil Omeri, a spokesman for the Supreme Court, confirmed that the case had been dismissed because of "problems with the prosecutors' evidence."
He said several of Rahman's family members have testified that the 41-year-old has mental problems. "It is the job of the attorney general's office to decide if he is mentally fit to stand trial," he told AP.
It appears the Afghan government and court "solves" this through some sort of insanity defense, which is hardly an ideal outcome at any rate.
Of course, when the defense is "lack of information" the prosecutor can bring the case forward again. It is also obvious that Rahman is extremely unsafe in Afghanistan, and the only way to save his life is him leaving the country.
The clerics are going to be furious with the court's dismissal, seeing this as a political decision under pressure from the west, and they'll be correct about that. Karzai is brought into a really difficult position by this conflict, and it surely does nothing to encourage those in the west who had hoped extremist Islam could be defeated by moderate Muslims.
10:03:12 PM
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Samizdata has a good report, with pictures, of the pro-free speech rally in London yesterday.
The United Kingdom has been one of the European countries that most notably went wobbly over the Mohammad cartoon affair.
Perhaps one of the most illuminating incidents was the Welsh cartoon panic, so wickedly described by Scott Burgess. It doesn't get more cowardly than this.
1:03:44 PM
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Paleontologists have found a fossil of what appears to be an intermediate between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens in Ethiopia.
The hominid cranium — found in two pieces and believed to be between 500,000 and 250,000 years old — "comes from a very significant period and is very close to the appearance of the anatomically modern human," said Sileshi Semaw, director of the Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project in Ethiopia.
Archaeologists found the early human cranium five weeks ago at Gawis in Ethiopia's northeastern Afar region, Sileshi said.
It appears almost the entire evolutionary line of hominids can be found in that area. Perhaps most famously, Australopithecus afarensis, including the first specimen Lucy, was found in Afar.
Sileshi, an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist based at Indiana University, said most fossil hominids are found in pieces but the near-complete skull — a rare find — provided a wealth of information.
"The Gawis cranium provides us with the opportunity to look at the face of one of our ancestors," the archaeology project said in a statement.
Homo erectus, which many believe was an ancestor of modern Homo sapiens, is thought to have died out 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
The cranium dates to a time about which little is known — the transition from African Homo erectus to modern humans. The fossil record from Africa for this period is sparse and most of the specimens poorly dated, project archaeologists said.
The face and cranium of the fossil are recognizably different from those of modern humans, but bear unmistakable anatomical evidence that it belongs to the modern human's ancestry, Sileshi said.
"A good fossil provides anatomical evidence that allows us to refine our understanding of evolution. A great fossil forces us to re-examine our views of human origins. I believe the Gawis cranium is a great fossil," said Scott Simpson, a project paleontologist from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine at Cleveland, Ohio.
Very interesting.
12:28:56 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.04.2006; 13:23:23.
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