Posted on 03/25/2006 10:19:43 PM PST by ncountylee
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 presidents 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 the Kremlins official biography, Putin, 53, obtained a PhD in economics from the St Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997. But the US researchers also established that his thesis was for a lesser degree that would not have entitled him to a full doctorate.
The embarrassing revelation that Putin, a former KGB agent, may have cheated and lied about his qualifications follows a long search by US scholars for evidence of the presidents academic prowess. A copy of the thesis was eventually located in the electronic files of a Moscow technical library.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Both Buran (Shuttle) and Tu-160 (B1-B) were stolen from the US, it is open information now. Russians usually made some changes to everything stolen to make it bigger (only exception was Joe-1).
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