<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><div>A blog entry from The Economist's Eastern Approaches (excrept) - please feel free to distribute: </div><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "arial", "helvetica", sans-serif"><div style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "times new roman", "new york", "times", serif"><div id="yiv2012924759"><div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 10pt; font-family: "arial", "helvetica", sans-serif"><div><br></div><div>Hungary's president: He copied, but he's not a plagiarist </div><div><br></div><div>Mar 27th 2012</div><div><br></div><div>ANYONE seeking to understand contemporary Hungary could do worse than to take a look at the ongoing scandal around President Pál Schmitt’s doctoral thesis.<br><br>Mr Schmitt submitted his
thesis, "Analysis of the Programme of the Modern Olympic Games", to the Budapest College of Physical Education in 1992, and received a summa cum laude grade. But in January <a target="_blank" href="http://hvg.hu">hvg.hu</a>, a news portal, accused him of having plagiarised substantial sections of his dissertation from a work by Nikolai Georgiev, a Bulgarian sports historian. Budapest’s Semmelweis University (which has since absorbed the PE
college) set up a committee to investigate the allegations.<br><br>Mr Schmitt strongly protested his innocence, saying that his dissertation had been reviewed by a panel of history professors. He also acknowledged that he knew and had worked with Mr Georgiev, and that they had used the same sources.<br><br>The committee's report is over 1,000 pages long, but it has released a three-page summary today. It states that 17 pages of Mr Schmitt's thesis were lifted wholesale from a paper written by Klaus Heineman, a German sports sociologist. A further 180 pages were partly copied from Mr Georgiev's work. The dissertation, the committee says, also lacks proper citations and a bibliography.<br><br>In most countries Mr Schmitt would now be writing his resignation letter (or at least finding one to copy). A year ago Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the highly regarded German defence minister, resigned in disgrace after having been stripped of his PhD for
plagiarism.<br><br>But it does not work like that in Hungary. </div><div><br></div><div>(...) </div><div><br></div><div>Read the full text here: http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2012/03/hungarys-president</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></div></div><br><br> </div> </div> </div></body></html>