Prime Ministerial Plagiarism Farce Continues In Romania

ananyo writes "Two investigations into the case of alleged plagiarism by Romania's prime minister, Victor Ponta, have reached opposite conclusions, ramping up the tension in a fierce struggle over political power in Bucharest. As Slashdot has noted before, Ponta stands accused of having copied large sections of his 2003 PhD thesis on the International Criminal Court. ... On 29 June, the Romanian National Council for the Attestation of University Titles (CNATDCU), which is in charge of investigating plagiarism charges in PhD theses according to Romanian law, had concluded that Ponta had copied and pasted 85 pages of his thesis from three books without properly marking the copied sections as quotes. But the committee was dissolved during the course of its meeting by acting education minister Liviu Pop. Meanwhile, concerns are rising in the European Union over what political observers say is a lack of respect in Romania for the fundamental principles of democracy."

WTF?

[c0lo]

How's this "news for nerds?" Or someone explain me why it even matters?

(right... I started to feel I overstayed on /.)

Re:Quality leadership?

[Darkness404]

Of course they are having a hard time finding an honest leader (if you can say that there can be such a thing as an honest leader of a country). Romania switched to being a free-ish state in 1989, meaning that all their politicians were either raised in the communist state or were trained by politicians raised in the communist state.

It takes generations to break the cycle (if in fact the cycle will be broken).

Re:WTF was he thinking?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Your whole work could always be in question, certainly cases like that crop up in sciences, but it's much harder to steal someone else's work when you have to be doing the work in a lab full of people.

It is plagarism for the liberal arts and falsified data [arstechnica.com] for the sciences.