Tuesday December 15, 2009

Canada Liberals remove faked PM assassination shot

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's opposition Liberal Party has taken down from its website a doctored photo of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot and killed in which Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper's face was substituted for Oswald's.

A Liberal official said on Tuesday the assassination picture, submitted as part of a photo contest in connection with the Copenhagen climate talks, should never have been there.

Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa December 9, 2009. Canada's opposition Liberal Party has taken down from its website a doctored photo of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot and killed in which Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper's face was substituted for Oswald's. (REUTERS/Chris Wattie/Files)

The party on Tuesday also took down another doctored photo of Harper with his fist in a cow's posterior, which it had offered as one of the "best seven" depicting where Harper would rather be than in Copenhagen.

"These pictures are submitted by the public, but any offensive image should not be put up. The Oswald picture clearly falls in that category and was taken down very quickly. It was wrong to have it up and we apologize for letting this one slip by," said party spokesman Mario Lague.

Oswald, the presumed assassin of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963, was himself assassinated shortly after Kennedy was killed.

The picture of Harper and the cow purported to show a new Conservative method of stopping greenhouse gases.

In last year's election campaign, Harper was forced to apologize because the Conservative website had an animated video of a puffin pooping on then-Liberal leader Stephane Dion.

(Reporting by Randall Palmer; editing by Peter Galloway)

News

Tuesday December 15, 2009

Canada Liberals remove faked PM assassination shot