And on the fifteenth minute of his Nazi scandal, Lars von Trier issued an apology to Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

Now that Barack Obama has opened his mouth on Cordoba House—aka Park51, aka (but not really) the "Ground Zero Mosque"—the ugly story won't be going away for a while. So, what's the latest?

In your finally Friday media column: Haaretz gets poetic, the Boston Globe gets profligate, Tim Russert gets remembered, and the newsy porn magazines get downsized:

Well isn't this handy! Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz has produced a list of the 36(!) Jews "who have shaped the 2008 U.S. election." That is a lot of them! It really takes so many to run the world? This is not even all the Jews involved in deciding who will next lead this glorious Christian nation! "But the Jewish vote remains a key element in battleground states, and, playing a wide variety of roles, Jews have helped to shape the campaigns. Thirty-six of them are mentioned below. This list is by no means all-inclusive, and, for considerations of space, many Jews who have played active parts in the campaigns do not appear," Haaretz explains. Still, it is nice of them to provide in one convenient location all the people who the crazies will blame for stealing the election next month. Streisand! (Listed: the original Lehman brother who is long dead. Not listed: all the other evil Wall Street people who burned all the money.) [Haaretz]

It's plenty easy to cry plagiarism these days, and even easier when the subject comes to reporting, where the facts are often stark and difficult to embellish upon, so we generally counsel restraint on whipping out the old "they ripped this off" accusation. Still, a tipster alerted us to recent New York Times coverage of the negotiations surrounding kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit containing a few sentences that seem awfully similar to those published earlier in Israel's Haaretz. Unavoidable duplication or jacked imitation? We'll take a look after the jump.