  In addition to shear and vorticity a homogeneous background may also exhibit
anisotropic curvature. Here a class of spacetimes is shown to exist where the
anisotropy is solely of the latter type, and the shear-free condition is
supported by a canonical, massless 2-form field. Such spacetimes possess a
preferred direction in the sky and at the same time a CMB which is isotropic at
the background level. A distortion of the luminosity distances is derived and
used to test the model against the CMB and supernovae (using the Union
catalog), and it is concluded that the latter exhibit a higher-than-expected
dependence on angular position. It is shown that future surveys could detect a
possible preferred direction by observing ~ 20 / (\Omega_{k0}^2) supernovae
over the whole sky.
