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For the second time in just over a week, Fox News is coming under fire for misusing old news footage. The latest flap is leading some people to charge that the cable news network is intentionally misleading its audience, while Fox claims a “production error.”

Wednesday’s incident occurred when Fox News host Gregg Jarrett mentioned that a Sarah Palin appearance and book signing in Grand Rapids, Michigan had a massive turnout. As footage rolled of a smiling and waving Palin amidst a throng of fans, Jarrett noted that the former Republican vice-presidential candidate is “continuing to draw huge crowds while she’s promoting her brand-new book,” adding that the images being shown were “some of the pictures just coming in to us…. The lines earlier had formed this morning.”

However, the video used in the segment was from a 2008 McCain/Palin campaign rally. In response to the minor uproar that arose after clips of Jarrett’s report hit the Internet, Fox senior vice-president of news Michael Clemente issued an initial statement saying, “This was a production error in which the copy editor changed a script and didn’t alert the control room to update the video.”

And if you believe that, they’ve got a great bridge for sale as well!

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A source close to the British Labour Government has just given me reliable information about the most radical copyright proposal I’ve ever seen.

Secretary of State Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now under debate in Parliament. These changes will give the Secretary of State (Mandelson — or his successor in the next government) the power to make “secondary legislation” (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988).

What that means is that an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright.

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These PC makers are lacking in neither financial resources nor opportunity. What they’re lacking is ambition, gumption, and passion for great software and new frontiers. They’re busy dying.

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Next he stashed a GoogleWhack page on his blog which contained the words Belle de Jour and Brooke Magnanti with the intention of spotting anyone searching for those terms together. Then he waited five years.

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The nation’s Catholic bishops approved a broad new document on marriage. “Since marriage and same-sex unions are different realities, it is not unjust discrimination to oppose the legal recognition of same-sex unions,” the letter says. “These unions pose a serious threat to the fabric of society that affects all people.”

Also Tuesday, the bishops reaffirmed a moral obligation to maintain nutrition and hydration for patients in a persistent vegetative state and approved a document on reproductive technology.

“Life-Giving Love in an Age of Technology” reaffirms Catholic teaching against in vitro fertilization, egg, sperm and embryo donation, surrogates and cloning.

The bishops meet little more than a week after their successful lobbying effort to strengthen restrictions on abortion in the House version of healthcare overhaul.

The bishops gathered here for their semi-annual meeting also heard a preliminary report on the “causes and contexts” of the clergy sexual abuse scandal that resulted in some 14,000 abuse claims and cost the church $2.6 billion since 1950.

Since the abuse scandal erupted in the USA in 2002, the Vatican has barred seminarians with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies,” and conducted an investigation of seminaries that concluded that “difficulties” related to “homosexual behavior” had been largely “overcome.”

The pastoral letter, which passed 180 to 45, spells out the traditional position of the Roman Catholic Church. Some Catholic critics have called it “unpastoral” for its focus on threats to marriage, including, in the bishops’ view, contraception and cohabitation, which the document compares to original sin.

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From a sharp-eyed reader comes this ad for Humble Oil (which later merged with Standard to become, yes, Exxon). It may win the All Time Millennial Award for Maximal Irony. It’s from a 1962 edition of Life Magazine, available on Google Books

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Readability has changed my life.

It’s a new button on your Web browser’s toolbar. With one click, it eliminates EVERYTHING from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else.

The text is also changed to a beautiful font and size (you choose them in advance) and the background is made plain white (or a light shading of your choice). Basically, it makes any Web page look like a printed book page or a Kindle page, and it’s glorious.

I’ve never understood how people can read Web articles when there’s Times-Square blinking going on all around them. Fortunately, I’ll never have to put up with them again. One click does the trick, thanks to Readability—and it’s free. (You get it, and set it up, here. It’s what’s known as a bookmarklet; you install it in your Web browser just by dragging its button onto your toolbar.)