Free Republic

Wesley K. Clark, a former NATO commander and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, will join UCLA this fall as a senior fellow, university officials plan to announce today. Clark, who is expected to arrive on campus about Oct. 1, will teach occasional seminars, publish policy papers and organize and hold an annual conference on national security, officials said. He will be affiliated with the university's Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations. The retired Army general's wide-ranging military, political and teaching background will serve UCLA and its students well, said Patricia O'Brien, executive dean of the university's College of Letters and...

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...