1. Do your own work. If you quote from this blog, observe proper academic rules and name the source.
2. Do not confuse the two cases. Germany’s former minister of defence, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, admitted plagiarizing large sections of his thesis, which compared European constitutions with the American model. Seif-al-Islam-Qaddafi – Seif Gadhafi in the Western media – has not made any admission. But plagiarism, even ghost-writing, is suspected. A commission is investigating. On March 4, the consulting firm Monitor Group, based in Cambridge, Mass., acknowledged in a statement that part of the work for which it had been paid a fee of $250,000 a month by the Libyan government included helping Seif Gadhafi with his doctoral dissertation. The subject was “The Role of Civil Society in the Democratization of Global Governance Institutions: From ‘Soft Power’ to Collective Decision Making.”
3. There is no comparison between the two universities. The small Bavarian University of Bayreuth, Guttenberg’s alma mater, was founded in 1975 and has not yet acquired an international reputation. Gadhafi’s university, the London School of Economics, is venerable and world renowned.
4. Guttenberg has many solid achievements to his credit. He has been an unusually attractive, effective and popular politician and was the leading candidate to succeed the chancellor. An example of Seif Gadhafi’s activities on the world stage is this: On December 10, 2004, shortly before a trip by Prime Minister Paul Martin to Tripoli, Seif requested an interview with The Globe and Mail and a formal apology from the Canadian government for joining U.S.-led sanctions against Libya after the Lockerbie bombing, and for denying him a student visa to study in Canada in 1997. His request was met with incredulity in Canada, and the Canadian government announced that no apology would be forthcoming.
5. Do not speculate on motives. In the Guttenberg case, they are unclear. It has been suggested that, since his family had made substantial financial contributions to his university, he thought he was entitled to a doctorate. This is pure speculation. In Gadhafi’s case, the financial connection between Libya and the L.S.E. is solid. The university had agreed to run a training program for elite Libyan civil servants for $3.6 million.
On March 2, when questions were raised in London about the possibility of plagiarism in Seif Gadhafi’s doctoral thesis, the university’s council decided to divert the $488,000 donation from the Gadhafi charity to establish a scholarship for North African students. Later, the council accepted the resignation from the school’s director, Sir Howard Davies. He acknowledged in his letter of resignation that he had acted as financial adviser to the Libyan government.
6. You may impress your examiners by contrasting the family backgrounds of Gadhafi and Guttenberg. Seif’s father, Muammar al-Gadhafi, was born in a bedouin tent in the desert near Sirt in 1942. His family belongs to a small tribe of Arabized Berbers, the Qaddadfa, who are stockherders with holdings in the Hun Oasis. (Do not attribute any special significance to the name of the oasis.) The history of the Guttenberg family goes back eight hundred years. It is the only family of the Uradel – the most ancient nobility – which consistently opposed Hitler from the beginning. Guttenberg’s wife is a great granddaughter of Bismarck.
Sources: various, including The New York Times (March 4)
A second video has been posted at YouTube about a novel published by Eric Koch in 2000 that takes place in Berlin in 1929 during the Crash, just before Hitler’s rise to power.
The book, Otto & Daria: A Wartime Journey Through No Man's Land, was launched on Saturday, September 24. 
Sketches 
Nobody asked me but I would have suggested to the Bayreuth University to overlook its famous alumnus’ “Peccadillo”. Even if there was plagiarism, so-called, i.e., help from another, I might have overlooked it. The family and its connections were so GREAT.
Yes, you were asked. Everybody who reads this blog is asked to respond. The University fo Bayreuth would have loved to overlook the minister’s lapse but the Munich newspaper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, blew the whistle. When the Chancellor took your forgiving view (though for different reasons), two hundred thousand outraged academics, backed by the opposition parties, demanded that he resign forthwith. Otherwise, they said, Germany’s students would have received the signal that cheating was okay.