Plagiarism

The University of Colorado professor who likened 9/11 victims to a Nazi leader was fired in retaliation for his controversial remarks, a Denver jury ruled Thursday. Jurors in the wrongful-termination lawsuit filed by Ward L. Churchill agreed with the embattled professor's contention that he was the victim of a "howling mob," not the perpetrator of academic misconduct. However, they awarded him only $1 in damages, an amount Churchill dismissed after the verdict as unimportant.

Campaign rhetoric borrowed by Sen. Barack Obama from a political friend prompted charges of plagiarism by his rival Monday as the competition for the Democratic presidential nomination turned into a war over words. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign criticized Obama over phrasing of a weekend speech that resembled remarks made by Deval Patrick during his successful Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign in 2006.

A South Korean doctor who accused a Los Angeles businessman of plagiarism has been convicted of defamation in his home country and ordered to pay a $750 fine. The Seoul Central District Court found that Dr. Jeong-Hwan Kim had damaged the reputation of Kwang Yul Cha, a fertility doctor and chancellor of a South Korean university with ties to Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. The academic dispute led to a rare showdown with an American medical journal.

A prominent fertility scientist whose firm owns Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles is embroiled in a plagiarism dispute that straddles two continents, has triggered legal battles in South Korea and has raised questions about the practices of a leading U.S. fertility journal. Dr. Kwang-Yul Cha, whose company also owns fertility clinics and a large hospital in Seoul, is listed as the primary author on a medical paper that appeared in December 2005 in the U.S.

A confessional letter from the widower of little-known British pianist Joyce Hatto would seem to confirm that multiple recordings credited to Hatto, who died last year at age 77, were plagiarized. Gramophone Online broke the news earlier this month that at least some of Hatto's more than 100 discs had borrowed from performances by other pianists.

California's voter-created stem cell institute approved a $2.6-million grant earlier this month to a Los Angeles-based research center whose founding president, a South Korean fertility expert, is embroiled in an international dispute over authorship of a medical journal article.

A prominent South Korean fertility researcher with growing healthcare enterprises in Los Angeles has launched a vigorous legal and public relations campaign in advance of a meeting today to decide whether he and others plagiarized a research paper. The moves by Dr. Kwang-Yul Cha are unusual and have surprised medical journal editors nationally, who worry about the ability of academic publications to cope with such challenges.

A medical society has delayed making a decision on whether to discipline a South Korean scientist with Los Angeles business ties who is accused of plagiarizing a research paper. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine's publications committee met Friday in Santa Fe, N.M., to discuss whether Kwang-Yul Cha and other researchers at one of his South Korean facilities copied a research paper that had previously been published in a Korean medical journal.

MEMO to Katie Couric: You should send flowers to Don Imus. No, not so the shock jock might spill his guts to her in the inevitable comeback-trail interview. Instead, Couric should be grateful that last week's Imus uproar took the heat off "CBS Evening News" for its own embarrassing ethical lapse, this one involving plagiarism and other brands of deception. America, luckily for the former "Today" show co-host, has room for only one media scandal at a time.

A U.S. medical journal will retract an article that set off an international plagiarism dispute but will take no action against the lead author, a prominent South Korean scientist whose Los Angeles institute is in line to receive state funds for stem cell research. The article, published by Kwang-Yul Cha and others in the journal Fertility and Sterility in December 2005, had been published the year before in a Korean journal by a former doctoral student in Cha's lab in South Korea.