plagiarism? what we are learning today from harvard insiders. plus, the deadly airport runway inferno. two lanes collide, five on one jet nearly killed, 400 escaped alive. how did the planes and up on the runway in the first place? and the senior member of hamas assassinated at an explosion in beirut. is the situation in the middle east about to get even worse? happy new year, and welcome to the lead. i m jake tapper, and we start out with raking news. harvard university s claudine gay is stepping down as president, resigning after just about six months on the job. the student journalist who broke the story of her stepping down for the harvard crimson newspaper noted that this is the shortest presidential tenure in harvard s august history. it has been quite a tumultuous month for the now former present. when asked for calling for the genocide of would violate harvard campuses code of conduct. yes or no. it can be, depending on the context. from that, to multiple allega
the supreme court is now smack in the middle of the 2024 campaign and donald trump could be asking the high court to both stay out of and jump into his legal troubles at the very same time. exactly. and republican-led house committee is launching an investigation into harvard s president over plagiarism allegation, and what the president is saying in the scrutiny of the new embattled president. and cnn is flying over the volcano in iceland. that is what you have to say. the best or the worst assignment ever. the volcano that is still erupting. i m kate bolduan with omar jim jimenez. john and kate are both off today. this is cnn news central. the supreme court of the united states is now in the spotlight and unwittingly front and center in the 2024 presidential election. the high court is facing a number of decisions that could directly impact how this election is going to play out. special counsel jack smith has asked the justices to fast-track a decision on wheth
professor allison frank jones. thank you for speaking to us. and obviously, thinking about the harvard campus today. must be a difficult place to be right now. let s bring in the former president of brandeis university, who talked a lot about this i don t know scandal is the right word, but controversy. do you think the resignation was inevitable, and was it because of the testimony or the plagiarism allegations? was a plagiarism. the testimony is honestly something we talked about the or that got a lot of attention, but my own view is, if it were only that, she would ve been able to ride this out. the answer she gave was not a good answer, and we talked about that as well, but i wouldn t have cost her her job. the plagiarism allegation is what really stuck, because it didn t go away and there was this sense of continuing investigations of back. i think i made it inevitable. it certainly kept harvard in the headlines for the wrong reasons, which is not anything any university wan
look, rand paul mum after plagiarism allegation. but then ultimately he decided to talk about it. his explanation for all those instances where he had found up to be ripping people off and copying portions of people s work and presenting it as his own, his explanation when he decided to talk about it was that it was very unfair for people to be point thing out. people were only reporting this sort of thing because they hate him. i take it as an insult and i will not lie down and say people can call me dishonest, misleading or misrepresenting. i have never intentionally done so and like i say, if dueling were legal in kentucky, if they keep it up you know, it would be a duel challenge. but i can t do that, because i can t hold office in kentucky. after saying he wished to duel with the people reporting on his many instances as doing this, senator paul then sat with an interview where the interviewer described him as furious.
over learning, he was a new math teacher at garfield high school. rand paul was just reading wikipedia and passing it off as his own words. a few days after that, one time he ripped off the associated press in his state of the union response in 2013. and then again in a speech at howard university in 2013, he ripped off a passage from the conservative group called focus on the family. also, there was him plagiarizing in an op-ed. pages and pages of his book were just copy and pasted. he did a lot. and all these stories started to break. and senator rand paul at first refused to answer any questions about them. look, rand paul mum after plagiarism allegation. but then he decided to talk about it. in his explanation where he had found up to be ripping people