The Null Device

A Catholic canon lawyer has filed heresy charges against Senator John Kerry, the US presidential candidate, in an ecclesiastical court. The charges relate to Kerry taking communion whilst advocating legalised abortion.

It will be interesting to see if the Catholic Church prosecutes these charges. They seem to have had a policy of not prescribing Catholic politicians' agendas, though this is changing somewhat with the conservative line taken by the current Pope (and, indeed, doesn't look to get any more liberal, with demographic shifts giving more power to conservative bishops in Africa). On the other hand, there are politics to consider; aside from the likelihood of a backlash occurring from any perceived interference in the election, the Vatican is not too fond of Bush (indeed, it has been claimed that the Pope thinks he may be the Antichrist foretold in the Book of Revelation, though this may well be apocryphal), and may not be too keen to shoot down the opposition.

¶ catholic heresy john kerry politics religiots us 5

Fed up with being kept in the dark and fed bullshit by local news outlets, increasingly many Americans are turning to British and European news sites for world coverage. (via bOING bOING)

The American public is apparently turning away from the mostly US-centric American media in search of unbiased reporting and other points of views. Much of the US media's reaction to France and Germany's intransigence on the Iraqi war issue has verged on the xenophobic, even in the so-called 'respectable' press. Some reporting has verged on the hysterical - one US news web site, NewsMax.com, recently captioned a photograph of young German anti-war protesters as "Hitler's children".

One of the overseas news sites cited there is none other than the Guardian, that much-vilified mouthpiece of Saddam Bin Laden and his evil cronies. It's funny, because even before 9/11, "Guardian reader" was British shorthand for a certain type of urbane moderate leftist, a person attracted to worthy causes and seeing themselves as a fundamentally good human being in a specifically liberal-humanist way. Nowadays, in parts of the US (or at least of blogspot.com), it has become this generation's equivalent of "Vietcong sympathiser" or something. (See also: "Communist" as generic term of abuse, as in "dot-communists" being stock-optioned yuppies putting rents up.)

Meanwhile, the Graun has this piece on al-Jazeera, the controversial Arab news network which has made many enemies in the Middle East, and now plans to roll out an English-language network to compete with the BBC and CNN.

¶ al-jazeera europe media uk us 4