German fraud scandal minister Guttenberg resigns

This video from Germany is about German Defense Minister Guttenberg, busted for plagiarism.

From the BBC:

1 March 2011 Last updated at 10:46 GMT

German defence minister Guttenberg resigns

German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has stepped down after he was found to have copied large parts of his university doctorate.

Mr Guttenberg, considered until recently a possible candidate for chancellor, has already been stripped of his PhD.

He told a news conference he was resigning from all political offices.

More than 20,000 German academics wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday complaining he was still in his job.

But Ms Merkel had continued to stand by him, with her party facing three state elections later this month.

“I thank the chancellor for her support but I have reached the limits of my strength,” he told reporters in Berlin.

A 39-year-old aristocrat, Mr Guttenberg had come under pressure after a Bremen University law professor began reviewing his 2006 thesis with the aid of the internet.

Reports emerged of a passage from a newspaper article being published word for word, and then of a paragraph from the US embassy website being used without attribution.

Eventually the University of Bayreuth that had awarded him a doctorate decided that Mr Guttenberg had “violated scientific duties to a considerable extent”.

See also here.

Until mid-February Germany’s minister for defence Baron Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg – or Gutti to his powerful ex-allies – was a noble and respected scion of a storied Bavarian family who could seemingly do no wrong, or at least none that got past his Teflon corona: here.