NO doubt the George W Bush re-election campaign has already checked out John Kerry’s middle initial. The F, they’ll have discovered, stands for Franklin. It’s not a deed-poll trick by the Democrat challenger to make himself the next JFK.

Two Jewish relatives of US presidential hopeful John Kerry perished in the Nazi genocide of the Second World War, officials at Israel’s Holocaust archive said today.

WITH a surname straight from the heartland of Ireland, most Americans could have been forgiven for thinking that Senator John Forbes Kerry of Massachusetts is another in a long line of Irish-American politicians who have made it big in Boston.