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Well, this is strange. Plagiarist Gerald Posner, who lost his job at the Daily Beast earlier this year and has since been accused of literary theft in his books as well, is now working as a lawyer and representing Qayum Karzai, brother of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, among other members of the Karzai family. Part of his new duties involves requesting corrections and "pursuing potential libel cases against his old colleagues in the Western media," according to Foreign Policy:
So far, Posner — who worked as a lawyer before becoming a journalist — says, his work on behalf of the Karzais has mostly involved pursuing potential libel cases against his old colleagues in the Western media, where the presidential family has taken a drubbing of late: The brothers have variously been accused of trafficking heroin, muscling their way into lucrative development projects, and selling materials for IEDs used against American troops. Posner hasn't filed any actual lawsuits yet, but says he is in contact with representatives of the New York Times, the New York Post, Fox News, the Toronto Star, and the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War think tank about reports they've published concerning the Karzais that he believes to be potentially libelous.
As evidence, see this correction from the Toronto Star:
A June 9 article about a Canadian dam project stalled in Afghanistan reported that sources in Kandahar told the Star that Qayum Karzai, brother of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, is the largest shareholder of Afghan security firm, Watan Risk Management. Karzai has since told the Star, through his U.S. lawyer, that he has no financial interest in Watan, which is operated by Rashid Popal, a cousin of the Karzai family.
According to Miami lawyer Gerald Posner: "At no time has Qayum Karzai ever had any financial or equitable interest in Watan Risk Management. At no time has he ever had any financial or equitable interest in any private security company in Afghanistan." Popal has also stated that Karzai does not own any shares in Watan.
The FP piece from July includes quotes from Posner. He says he's planning a comeback:
Posner says he hopes to eventually return to journalism — his big project is completing a book on the Vatican than he began several years ago. "I'm not comparing myself to Doris Kearns Goodwin," he says, referring to the historian who was similarly tarred as a plagiarist before becoming a bestselling author with her book on Abraham Lincoln's policy brain trust, Team of Rivals. "But what she did was disappear for a couple years and came back with a bulletproof, superb book. What I need to do is eventually come out with a book — it won't be about Afghanistan, but in three or four years I'll come back with that. And people will be able to say, he didn't put together two words from anyone."
The Portland Press Herald has fired columnist Leigh Donaldson because a recent column of his “contained a substantial amount of content from a column published on AlterNet.org that was used without attribution.” The paper published a 
The Wall Street Journal published this correction yesterday:
In late 2007, I wrote a 
First, a bit of news: I launched a 
The New York Times 
Acting on a reader tip, Slate’s Jack Shafer 
A letter to the editor that we published Wednesday, “Obama’s speech” submitted by Ron Gardner of Atwater, has been removed from our Web site. The letter was taken almost word for word from a column, “State of the Union: Obama v. Constitution,” by Mark Alexander on the Web site, The Patriot Post.
We failed to acknowledge South Africa’s Sunday Times as the source of an article about a passenger on a South African air force flight who was catapulted into the sky when his ejector seat fired. Several passages, including quotes from a South African air force spokesman, a retired South African air force instructor pilot and an observer, were taken from a story on Times Live, the South African paper’s website (Man accidentally ejects himself from plane, 2 November, guardian.co.uk). 
I initially didn’t post about this story because it struck me as a tale of well-meaning aggregation gone wrong, but it seems that the issue was bigger than that. The bottom line is that the Hartford Courant has apologized for repeatedly and knowingly plagiarizing the work of its competitors.
This has been an incredibly bad summer for the Telegraph-Journal, a newspaper in New Brunswick.
The cover article of The Times Magazine on Sunday reported on whales and the possibility of interspecies communication between them and humans. The final two paragraphs of the article described an occasion in 2005 when a humpback whale became entangled in crab-trap ropes and was freed by a rescue team. Some of the language in the retelling of that event was identical to descriptions of the rescue in an e-mail message that circulated widely after the incident. Specifically, the lines that the whale swam “in joyous circles” after it was freed and “nudged” the divers gently, “as if in thanks”; that the divers thought it was “the most beautiful experience they ever had”; and that one diver said he would “never be the same” appeared in the e-mail message, which was sent to The Times’s writer, Charles Siebert, in the course of his reporting. In seeking to confirm the accuracy of the article, Mr. Siebert read several accounts of the episode, including one published by The San Francisco Chronicle in December 2005 on which he based his retelling.
The Press Gazette’s Axegrinder blog 
A college student interning at the Colorado Spring Gazette has been fired after the paper discovered she plagiarized from the New York Times in four recent articles. An 
The new book from Wired editor and bestselling author Chris Anderson contains multiple passages lifted from Wikipedia. The 
Barney Gimbel, a writer with Fortune magazine, resigned after being shown evidence that he had plagiarized from an article in the New York Times Magazine. The New York Observer 
An 
