from The Associated Press
through Breitbart.com

NEW YORK (AP) - Joel Siegel, a longtime movie critic for WABC-TV and “Good Morning America” who racked up five New York Emmy Awards for his insightful work, died Friday, the television station said. He was 63.

The station said Siegel, who was famous for his weekly reviews, had been battling colon cancer.

“Joel was an important part of ABC News and we will miss him,” ABC News President David Westin said in a release. “He was a brilliant reviewer and a great reporter. But much more, he was our dear friend and colleague. Our thoughts and prayers are with Joel’s family.”

Siegel was known for his sense of humor, movie acumen and sharp judgment. He never let an actor off the hook if the performance was lackluster.

“The appeal of Matthew McConaughey has long evaded me both as a pinup and as an actor,” Siegel opined in his review of “We Are Marshall,” a 2006 film. “His constant ticks, bad hair and strained syntax as a coach fumble what should have been the tragic and inspirational story of the rebuilding of Marshall University’s football team after a devastating plane crash.”

Dave Davis, president and general manager of WABC-TV, said Siegel loved to poke fun at uninspiring movies.

“No one had more fun writing about a bad movie than Joel,” Davis said.

ABC anchor Charles Gibson said Siegel knew how to tell a story.

“He had an inexhaustible supply of stories-most funny, many poignant, all with a point or a punch line,” Gibson said.

read more at Breitbart.com

Are you telling me that police can’t tell the difference between rotten fruit and a human fetus? I actually thought this article was a joke. - JS

DALLAS (AP) - A black bag found in a middle school girls’ locker room contained rotten oranges and not a human fetus, the Dallas County medical examiner reported Friday.

A janitor doing end-of’school cleaning Thursday at Ben Franklin Middle School found what appeared to be a human fetus in a trash bag inside a locker, police said.

The janitor called the police, who found it difficult to determine the contents of the bag, Dallas police spokeswoman Sr. Cpl. Janice Crowther said.

Police then turned over the bag to the Dallas County Medical Examiner.

By ARTHUR H. ROTSTEIN
Associated Press Writer

NOGALES, Ariz. (AP) - U.S. and Mexican law enforcement agents executing simultaneous raids discovered a recently completed smuggling tunnel linking the two countries, officials said Friday.

The entrances to the tunnel, described as a passageway its builders planned to use to smuggle drugs, were discovered in a home in Nogales, Ariz., and an apartment in Nogales, Mexico, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

Five people were arrested during the raid on the Mexican location. No arrests had yet been made on the U.S. side of the border.

Investigators tipped to the tunnel’s existence during its construction have had it under surveillance since April, and no drugs were moved through it before authorities moved in, said Terry Kirkpatrick, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official.

This tunnel crossed about 100 yards as the crow flies, but was actually about 200 yards long because it meandered and dipped. The dirt walls were reinforced in areas with wooden supports and sand bags and had a lighting system, but no ventilation.

Of more than 20 tunnels that have been found in Nogales, only about four, including the latest, have not been tied into the drainage system that runs cross-border beneath Nogales, Mexico, and Nogales, Ariz.

“To have a fully serviced independent tunnel absent using the drainage system under these two cities is a significant event for us,” said Tony Coulson, assistant special agent in charge for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Arizona.

Agents who served a search warrant late Thursday at the tiny, one- story home found the tunnel entrance hidden beneath plywood sheets weighted down with bags of dirt inside a utility room.

The home was largely unfurnished, and searchers found picks, a jackhammer and other excavation equipment.

The tunnel was the largest discovered along the U.S.-Mexico border since January 2006, when a tunnel extending nearly a half-mile from San Diego to Tijuana was found.

Federal officials said the tunnel discovered Thursday has been temporarily sealed and will be filled in after the investigation is complete.

By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer
from SFGate.com

For years he was known as chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney and assistant to President Bush. On Wednesday, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby became federal inmate No. 28301-016.

Libby, who was convicted in March of lying and obstructing an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative’s identity, faces 2 1/2 years in prison.

The assignment of an inmate number by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons represents another step on the road to prison. Inmate numbers stay with prisoners even after their release.

Libby, however, is hoping that an appeals court will intervene and put the sentence on hold before he is ordered to surrender.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has not indicated how quickly it will rule. Lawyers in the case said Libby had not yet been assigned to a prison or given a date to surrender.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald opposes Libby’s bid to delay his prison term. He says Libby does not have a good chance of having his conviction overturned and should begin serving prison time immediately.

Libby’s friends have asked President Bush to step in and pardon him, a request that Bush has sidestepped while the legal case drags on.

Libby, 56, is the only person charged in the leak scandal, which erupted after CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity was revealed in a 2003 syndicated newspaper column. Libby was not the source for that leak and neither of the two Bush administration officials who provided the information were ever charged.

When confronted by prosecutors and FBI agents, however, Libby lied about how he learned about Plame and whom he told, a jury found. He is the highest-ranking White House official sentenced to prison since the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.

The Bureau of Prisons does not say where its inmates will serve until they begin their sentence. Normally, prisoners are assigned to facilities within 200 miles of home. As a nonviolent, first-time offender, Libby likely will be placed in a minimum security prison camp.

Another one bites the dust…….why? If they did nothing wrong, why are they jumping ship?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An assistant attorney general at the Justice Department announced her resignation on Friday, becoming the seventh official to quit the department since the Democratic-led Congress launched an investigation in March into the firing of nine federal prosecutors.

Rachel Brand, assistant attorney general for legal policy, said she would step down on July 9. No reason was given.

Brand was nominated to her position on March 29, 2005, and confirmed by the Senate four months later.

She was responsible for preparing Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito for their confirmation hearings and helped in the reauthorization in 2006 of the USA Patriot Act, an anti-terrorism law that Congress approved after the September 11 attacks.

Last week, President George W. Bush’s nominee for the third-ranking Justice Department post withdrew his name just days before a Senate committee was to hold a hearing on his nomination.

More Boston.com

Can this administration do ANYTHING right? And isn’t Michael Chertoff in charge of this? WHY does this guy still have a job????

By ALICIA A. CALDWELL
Associated Press Writer

COLUMBUS, N.M. (AP) — The 1.5-mile barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border was designed to keep cars from illegally crossing into the United States. There’s just one problem: It was accidentally built on Mexican soil. Now embarrassed border officials say the mistake could cost the federal government more than $3 million to fix.

The barrier was part of more than 15 miles of border fence built in 2000, stretching from the town of Columbus to an onion farm and cattle ranch.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman said the vertical metal tubes were sunk into the ground and filled with cement along what officials firmly believed was the border. But a routine aerial survey in March revealed that the barrier protrudes into Mexico by 1 to 6 feet.

More at the AP

The Washington Post’s superb “Angler” series on Dick Cheney and a post I’m writing on torture made me want to re-visit some sections of Ron Suskind’s book The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of its Enemies Since 9/11.

Most news junkies should be familiar with its most explosive, damning account: Bush telling the briefer flown out to Crawford to warn him about bin Laden attacking the U.S., “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.” (Barton Gellman’s review in The Washington Post covers many of the key passages in the book, including the Crawford briefing and some of the material I’ll be excerpting below. This earlier post also provides some context on the bin Laden revisionism by the Bush administration.) I’ve also previously quoted passages from The One Percent Doctrine on the infamous sixteen words in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech and a section on Bush’s general immaturity and naiveté.

All quotations come from the edition linked above, the first hardcover edition printed by Simon & Shuster, New York, 2006.

Suskind offers several interesting passages about Abu Zubaydah, a member of al Qaeda captured by the U.S. in March 2002:
(more…)

All of us at Blue Herald invite you to listen to or download The July 2, 2007 edition of Blue Herald Radio.

Our Guests this week include:

Craig Aaron from Free Press discussing the lopsided playing field of talk radio and the recent introduction of The Local Community Radio Act (H.R. 2080) and (S. 1675).

www.freepress.net

We’ll also be talking with Teresa Stack, President of “The Nation” magazine about the upcoming (July 15) postal hike that will affect magazines like “The Nation” and “Mother Jones” AND cost them an additional ONE HALF MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR to deliver your magazine, while conglomerates such as Time-Warner will see only a tiny increase and in some cases a decrease. Is it odd that the program was written by Time-Warner.

www.thenation.com

In both instances, YOU CAN HELP. We’ll tell you how.

The newest edition of Blue Herald Radio will be available for listening on the site, downloading through iTunes or downloading as an mp3 to listen to on your computer’s media player beginning Monday July 2nd at 5:00AM (EDT)

Please join us for Blue Herald Radio with news, politics, opinion, interviews and music.

Oh gee…..wonder how they’ll rule.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Friday to review whether Guantanamo Bay detainees may go to court to challenge their indefinite confinement.

The action was announced without comment along with other end-of-term orders.

Last week, lawyers for the detainees filed a statement from a military lawyer in which he described the inadequacy of the process the administration has put forward as an alternative to a full review by civilian courts.

In February, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld a Bush administration law that stripped federal courts of their ability to hear the detainees’ challenges to their confinement.

On April 2, the Supreme Court denied the detainees’ request to review the February decision. The detainees then petitioned the court to reconsider its position.

Dismissing the petitions would be “a profound deprivation” of the prisoners’ right to speedy court review, lawyers for the detainees said.

Read more here