|
|
Forget the cookies, what about marijuana brownies?
Girl Scout camp officials were horrified to learn that 5,000 marijuana plants had been found growing on their camp grounds.
Police found the hidden marijuana farm with plants in various stages of cultivation in a wooded swampy area of Kosciusko County, according to documents filed Monday in U.S. District Court in South Bend. Some of the plants were growing on land belonging to a local resident, while the bulk - about 5,000 plants - were growing on camp land. State troopers in an airplane spotted the plots.
Mario Comacho, 44, Mariano Gonzales, 38, and a juvenile were arrested last week after police found the farm. Comacho and Gonzales, both of Goshen, appeared for an initial hearing Monday in federal court on charges of possession of more than 1,000 marijuana plants with the intent to distribute. Neither man had an attorney, according to court documents.
Johnny Coy, who owns part of the land where the pot was found growing, said he wasn’t aware of the operation and rarely visits the swampy area.
Parents of campers were informed of the discovery when they picked up their children.
Thats the first thing I would want to hear, upon picking up my kid from Girl Scout camp. No wonder they sell so many cookies every year.
source: Girl Scout Camp Marijuana Farm Busted [cbs news]
Lara Logan, the chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, tells The Washington Post she is pregnant, and the father is a married federal contractor whom she met while stationed in Iraq.
Logan’s relationship with Joseph Burkett - who’s in the midst of a divorce from wife Kimberly, with whom he has a 3-year-old daughter - has made media headlines, including the front page of the New York Post.
Logan is going through a divorce from estranged husband Jason Siemon, a Chicago-based energy lobbyist whom she married in 1998.
“Nobody likes to read about themselves like that, especially the way it’s been sensationalized,” Logan, 37, told The Washington Post. “I hated it. But I’m just going to rise above it and keep going.”
Logan, whose pregnancy was unplanned, told the newspaper her due date is in January, and she’s “looking forward to being a mom.”
Logan - a South Africa native who began dating Burkett following her November breakup with CNN correspondent Michael Ware - said she and Burkett plan to marry eventually.
Logan’s publicist, Tom Keaney, declined to comment.
The reporter - known for her intrepid war coverage - was promoted to CBS’ chief foreign affairs correspondent last month, and is based in Washington.
Logan, a contributor to “60 Minutes,” has won numerous reporting accolades, including an Emmy and Overseas Press Club Award
Alec Baldwin as the governor? Not even a movie could I believe this. Yet Alec would like your vote for governor of California. Scarey huh? Alec has diarrhea of the mouth and would probably start a war with Canada or Mexico. If he can go off on a little girl that he claims to love the rest of us had better look out.
“There are other things I want to do besides acting” he tells Morley Safer on “60 Minutes” this Sunday. “In a matter of weeks, I’m going to be 50.” Baldwin was thinking of running for governor two years ago. Just before he went nut-so and left a voice mail for his daughter Ireland, then 11, calling her “a rude, thoughtless little pig.”
When asked if he wanted a chance to apologize for calling Kim Basinger’s lawyer, Judy Bogen, a “300-pound homunculus with a face like a clenched fist,” Baldwin replied, “I was being kind, Morley.”
In the past, Baldwin has done nothing to hide his brand of politics. He has called the vice president Dick Cheney a terrorist, then said he wasn’t a terrorist but rather “a lying, thieving oil whore and murderer of the U.S. Constitution.” Wasn’t Alec the one who said he would move to Canada if George W. Bush was elected President? Guess he couldn’t find a flight!
source: Alec Baldwin Coming to an Election Near You? [CitizenSugar]; Political Office In Alec Baldwin’s Future? [cbs news]
Dan Rather, whose career at CBS News came to a screeching halt 15 months ago over his role in an unsubstantiated report questioning President Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service, filed a $70 million lawsuit this afternoon against the network, its corporate parent VIACOM and three of his former bosses.
SHOCKER! Who saw this one coming?
 Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005. He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast and, in the process, “seriously damaged his reputation.” As plaintiffs, the suit names CBS and its chief executive, Leslie Moonves; Viacom and its chief executive, Sumner Redstone; and Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News.
In the suit, filed this afternoon in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Rather charges that CBS and its executives made him “a scapegoat” in an attempt “to pacify the White House,” though the formal complaint presents virtually no direct evidence to that effect. To buttress this claim, Mr. Rather quotes the executive who oversaw his regular segment on CBS Radio, telling Mr. Rather in November 2004 that he was losing that slot, effective immediately, because of “pressure from ‘the right wing.’ ”
He also continues to take vehement issue with the appointment by CBS of Richard Thornburgh, an attorney general in the administration of the elder President Bush , as one of the two outside panelists given the job of reviewing how the disputed broadcast had been prepared.
Mr. Rather sums up that he was forced to apologize on air, even though he felt no apology was warranted.
Mr. Rather says in the filing that he allowed himself to be reduced to little more than a patsy in the furor that followed, after CBS — and later the outside panel it commissioned — concluded that the report was based on documents that could not be authenticated. Under pressure, Mr. Rather says, he delivered a public apology on his newscast on Sept. 20, 2004 — written not by him but by a CBS corporate publicist — “despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted.”
source: Rather Files $70 Million Suit Against CBS [ny times]; Dan Rather sues CBS for $70 million [CNN]
Marvel is killing Captain America. Again.
So reports the AP.
Holy homicide, Batman!
Captain America is dead!
Assassinated, in fact, as he walks into a federal courthouse in New York, under arrest and in handcuffs, headed to his arraignment for refusing to sign the government’s Superhero Registration Act and forcibly revealing his true identity.
It all happens in the latest edition of Marvel Comics, which hit newsstands on Wednesday.
A sniper, firing a high-powered rifle from a rooftop, hits the famed red, white and blue leader of the Avengers with three bullets and escapes the scene, leaving the weapon behind Oswald-style, as police and Captain America’s military escort cope with chaos in the streets.
What does this mean? Can the pulverizing patriot really be dead, shot down on the courthouse steps after 66 years of battling villains from Adolf Hitler to the Red Skull? Will the killer or killers be captured?
The only way to find out, says Dan Buckley, president and publisher of Marvel Entertainment, is to “read the book” as the story line unfolds. Buckley will not divulge details of what he describes as “really cool plot twists,” but does not rule out the possibility that Captain America is not really dead or is somehow resurrected. “When you live in a world of make-believe, a lot of things are possible,” he said in a telephone interview.
In any case, readers should not necessarily despair. After all, this is not the first time Captain America was presumed dead. In the last days of World War II, his alter-ego, the former arts student Steve Rogers, was believed killed by a bomb aboard an experimental pilot-less plane, only to have been found later, frozen in a cake of ice, by Sub-Mariner (remember him?).
[...]
Captain America was an early member of the pantheon of comic book heroes that began with Superman in the 1930s. He landed on newsstands in March 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor — delivering a a punch to Hitler on the cover of his first issue, a sock-in-the-jaw reminder that there was a war on and the United States was not involved. Since then, Marvel Entertainment Inc., has sold more than 200 million copies of Captain America magazine in 75 countries.
In the most recent story line, he became involved in a superhero “civil war,” taking up sides against former buddy Iron Man in the registration controversy, climaxed by his arrest and assassination.
Killing off comic book heroes, only to bring them back again, is a time-honored gimmick in the business. Unless sales have sunk so low as to make the book no longer profitable, I’m sure Cap will be Back.
A Reuters report adds more details:
“This is the end of Steve Rogers, the meat and potatoes guy from 1941,” Dan Buckley, president and publisher of publishing, Marvel Entertainment, told Reuters. “But Captain America is a costume, and there are other people who could take it over. He is iconic, and we’re continuing the comic books,” he added. But he declined to speculate who could step into the hero’s 66-year-old boots.
He said the continuing comic series would initially be focused on the reaction of other characters to Captain America’s death.
This was similar to the death of Superman in 1993, when the leading superhero of Marvel rival D.C. Comics was killed off after about 55 years — only to be brought back months later.
Captain America has appeared in about 210 million comics in 75 countries, but currently his title sells up to 80,000 copies a month in the United States, down from about 150,000 in their heyday.
Unlike other comic heroes such as Spider-Man, Superman, Batman and the Fantastic Four, the Captain has yet to win Hollywood fame, though Buckley said there are plans for a Captain America movie. “He is still popular, but he has not been getting the same attention as Spider-Man and others,” said Buckley. “We hope this will make him more popular in the short-term at least.”
Andy Khouri has an excellent roundup of mainstream media reaction at the Comic Book Resource.
News broke this morning of the death of Marvel Comics superhero Captain America in issue #25 of the character’s monthly series, which shipped today to comic stores everywhere. Interestingly, the story has been covered by numerous mainstream media outlets including CBS News and CNN, operations not known for their coverage of comic book storylines.
“Captain America Killed Outside Courthouse” read the headline on CBSNews.com’s Entertainment section.
“Captain America Killed!” screamed the headline on page 3 of the New York Daily News.
“Comic Book Superhero Captain America Dies on the Page,” said the AP, whose story was run in too many places to count, such as ABC News.
 |
| Banner headline on page 3 of today’s edition of The New York Daily News |
Few of these articles are particularly substantive, with most giving little to no context at all as to the fictional circumstances of Captain America’s death, reporting only that he’s died. Nevertheless, that so many such articles exist at all is quite remarkable for the small comics industry, and will certainly remind long-time comic fans of the media attention generated by DC Comics’ “Death of Superman” event in 1992. “Superman” #75, while similarly controversial amongst longtime readers, sold a great many comic books and gave new and returning fans a place to begin reading stories of the DC Universe. Written by Ed Brubaker and illustrated by Steve Epting, “Captain America” #25 is clearly designed to be accessible by everyone and achieve the same goal for Marvel Comics.
“There is a lot to be read in there. But I’m not one who is going to tell people, this is what you should read into it, because I could look into it and read several different types of messages,” Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada said in a taped interview with CNN, who, unlike other mainstream news sources, actually began their article with a spoiler warning and included a recap of the events of “Civil War.”
These are apparently the two alternate covers of (vol. 5) issue #25:
Sir Paul McCartney and Heather Mills McCartney’s high profile divorce made its way to a courtroom last week, and some say McCartney is claiming an early victory. If true, I can’t say that the news upsets me.
 The former Beatle was seen emerging from a court hearing and flashed a “V” for victory sign while Mills emerged looking like a woman scorned. The ugly divorce battle is being played out in front of a judge and on front pages.
While it’s too soon to declare a winner, those keeping score say McCartney seems to be up by a couple of touchdowns.
 “Sir Paul McCartney has come out and done the thumbs up sign, we’re all thinking, ‘Oh, he’s got one over on her.’ Don’t underestimate the power of Heather Mills. She’s ruthless,” entertainment reporter Neil Sean told CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips. “And what we quite like about the fact is that while she’s playing this rather sickly, sweet, serene person, remember this is a woman who bagged a billionaire, if you like, from nowhere with a checkered past.”
A marriage that only lasted four years seems to have had a lot crammed into it. Most of it, according to Mills, was bad. Leaked court papers have revealed she’s accused McCartney of violent abuse. He has countered by accusing her of lying and calling her a fantasist. According to courtroom sources, McCartney’s claims have made more of an impression on the judge.
British attorney Mark Stephens said that the court battle has taken a toll on Mills. She recently had an outburst in court which raised many eyebrows in the London legal community.
“There was shouting heard from inside the courtroom and she came bursting out, was in tears and had to be consoled,” Stephens told The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith. “Clearly this truth and lies dossier is starting to get to her. They started to undermine her credibility at every possible turn taking every public utterance she’s made about the marriage and the relationship and undermined it so she has no standing before the judge. So the judge can’t believe anything she has to say. That … seems to be the tactic. Her legal team seems to be out-lawyered.”
Stephens said the McCartney team has examined whether Mills was a prostitute or whether she posed for explicit photos, making the experience as harrowing as possible for her. Not only has McCartney’s lawyers’ tactics worked in court, they have also damaged Mills in the court of public opinion.
“In the battle for the PR, it really has to be Sir Paul McCartney ,” Sean said. “You’ve got to remember that he’s got a 40-year history of people being in love with him and his music.”
source
With Saddam Hussein’s execution scheduled to take place in the next couple of days and videotaped, there’s plenty of speculation about how the hanging will be covered on television. Reuters’ Hollywood Reporter Paul Gough assures us it will be “tasteful.”
Television networks face a killer of a conundrum with the impending execution of Saddam Hussein, whose hanging could be videotaped and perhaps aired on Iraqi TV.
The timing of Saddam’s date with the gallows was unclear, but late Thursday CBS, NBC and Fox News Channel reported that the former dictator, convicted this year in the deaths of 148 people in 1982, would be turned over by the American military to the Iraqi government within 36 hours and hanged before the start of a Muslim holiday on Sunday.
Several sources said Saddam’s execution would be videotaped by the Iraqi government, though it wasn’t clear whether it would be released to the public or broadcast. “We will video everything,” Iraqi National Security adviser Mouffak al Rubaie told CBS News.
Judging by the Iraqi government’s release Tuesday of videotape of the hanging of 13 convicts, it could be a gruesome affair. Meetings were held Thursday in at least two network headquarters over how to handle the potentially graphic images.
ABC and CBS said they wouldn’t air the full execution if the video became available. “We’re very aware that we’re coming into people’s living rooms and that there could be children watching,” CBS News senior vp Linda Mason said.
Mason and her network counterparts have broadcast standards and procedures they follow in these cases. Phil Alongi, special-events executive producer at NBC News, said there are ways the network can approach the video or photographs that will get the point across without having to be graphic.
The operative word: taste.
“We have very, very strict guidelines with how to deal with that,” said Bob Murphy, senior vp at ABC News. “If there were pictures made available of the execution, they would have to be viewed by senior management before we would put them on the air, and we would make a judgment of taste and propriety of what we would show.”
CNN and Fox News Channel still were discussing what they would do if the footage were made available. It also wasn’t clear what the newly launched network Al-Jazeera International would do. An e-mail and phone call to the channel’s Qatar headquarters weren’t returned Thursday. Despite popular assumptions to the contrary, Al-Jazeera’s pan-Arab channel has never shown an execution.
While video of an execution would be unprecedented in U.S. television, the war in Iraq has led to a number of judgment calls on graphic video. The U.S. military released graphic photographs of Saddam’s two sons who were killed in a U.S. raid on their Mosul hideout in July 2003. “We edited down the pictures to show only what was appropriate, what we thought was appropriate,” Murphy said. “We didn’t show the pictures live (when the network received them), and we made sure that they showed enough of the bodies so that it was clearly them, but we didn’t dwell on it.”
None of the networks showed the beheading of Nick Berg, an American who was kidnapped and killed in Iraq in May 2004. But Berg’s beheading by kidnappers — along with the killings of others, including a South Korean — was distributed on the Internet and fed to American networks that chose not to use the footage.
Mason, Alongi and Murphy said Thursday that an execution video widely distributed on the Internet wouldn’t change their minds about not airing the graphic portions of any video.
Steve Benen and Kim Priestap both predict it will be online soon. There’s no reason to doubt that. Indeed, AllahPundit promises he’ll “do everything in my power to get it for you.”
Frankly, I’ve got no interest in seeing it. Once I find it, though, I’ll be sure to make it available for those who want to see it.
UPDATE: You can see it by clicking … HERE
-
Webloggin - Blog Archive linked with Report - About An Hour Until Judgment Time For Saddam
-
Bollywood & Hollywood News linked with Hollywood Movies Video Clips, Hollywood Movie Trailers - Coolbuddy
Ed Bradley, the award-winning television journalist who broke racial barriers at CBS News and created a distinctive, powerful body of work during his 26 years on “60 Minutes,” died Thursday. He was 65.
Though he had been ill and had undergone heart bypass surgery about a year ago, he remained active on “60 Minutes.” In one of his last reports, an investigation of the Duke case that aired last month, he broke new ground with the first interviews with the accused.
“The first time I really understood that he was ill, on the air, was a couple of weeks ago,” said fellow “60 Minutes” correspondent Mike Wallace. “He was narrating a story, and his rich voice wasn’t there anymore. It was just thinner.”
Born June 22, 1941, Bradley grew up in a tough section of Philadelphia, where he once recalled that his parents worked 20-hour days at two jobs apiece. “I was told, `You can be anything you want, kid,’” he once told an interviewer. “When you hear that often enough, you believe it.”
After graduating from the historically black Cheyney State College (now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania), he launched his career as a jazz DJ — he was a lifelong jazz fan — and news reporter for a Philadelphia radio station in 1963. He moved to New York’s WCBS radio four years later.
He joined CBS News as a stringer in the Paris bureau in 1971, transferring a year later to the Saigon bureau during the Vietnam War. He was wounded while on assignment in Cambodia. He was named a CBS News correspondent in early 1973 and moved to the Washington bureau in June 1974. He later returned to Vietnam, covering the fall of that country and Cambodia.
Cronkite recalled first meeting Bradley in Vietnam: “He seemed to be fearless, an incredibly smart reporter in getting the story.”
After Southeast Asia, Bradley returned to the United States and covered Jimmy Carter’s successful campaign for the White House. He followed Carter to Washington, in 1976 becoming CBS’ first black White House correspondent — a prestigious position that Bradley didn’t enjoy.
He jumped from Washington to doing pieces for “CBS Reports,” traveling to Cambodia, China, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. It was his Emmy-winning 1979 piece on Vietnamese boat refugees that eventually landed him on “60 Minutes.”
The latter piece still resonates for Wallace. “I’ll never forget the picture of Ed picking up a man who was about to drown,” he said. “… If Bradley told a story, you could be sure it was accurate, and at bottom it was done with integrity.”
“60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt, in his book “Minute by Minute,” was quick to appreciate Bradley after he arrived at the show. “He’s so good and so savvy and so lights up the tube every time he’s on it that I wonder what took us so long,” Hewitt wrote.
Bradley recently served as a radio host for “Jazz at Lincoln Center,” where he won one of his four Peabody awards.
Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of Lincoln Center’s jazz department, called Bradley “one of our definitive cultural figures, a man of unsurpassed curiosity, intelligence, dignity and heart.”
Accepting his lifetime achievement award from the black journalists association, Bradley remembered being present at some of the organization’s first meetings in New York.
“I look around this room tonight and I can see how much our profession has changed and our numbers have grown,” he said. “I also see it every day as I travel the country reporting stories for ‘60 Minutes.’ All I have to do is turn on the TV and I can see the progress that has been made.”
But, he added, “There are many more rivers to cross, and many more stories to cover and, I hope, a lot left in this lifetime.”
Bradley is survived by his wife, Patricia Blanchet. source
Katie Couric is suffering the worst week yet as determined by the Nielsen Ratings. Was the switch from NBC to CBS a good move?
The fifth week was the toughest for Katie Couric, whose viewership on the “CBS Evening News” has dropped each week since her debut the day after Labor Day.
Her broadcast averaged 7.04 million viewers last week, third to NBC’s “Nightly News” (8.56 million) and ABC’s “World News” (7.97 million), according to Nielsen Media Research.
CBS points out that the “CBS Evening News” is the only one of the three network newscasts with more viewers last week than the same week a year earlier. NBC’s margin of victory last year was 2.2 million.
“Where we were last week or even in the weeks to come is not as important as where we are next year and even the year after that,” said CBS News President Sean McManus. “As we have said from the very beginning, we are focused on the long term and on making slow and steady progress, which we are doing.”
But the steady erosion is a discouraging sign, especially after 13.6 million people tuned in for Couric’s first broadcast.
Last week was a strong one for ABC’s “World News,” which sent anchor Charles Gibson to Amish country to follow up the school shooting story; neither Couric nor Brian Williams traveled for that story. ABC News may also have benefited from Brian Ross leading the way on the scandal involving congressional pages.
Asked whether he believed the decision to keep Couric in New York hurt CBS, Hartman said: “You can overthink things, and I’m trying not to, because it’s such a long-haul deal.” source
 Jonathan Adler cites recent reports that the Dixie Chicks’ new CD has debuted at #1 on the album charts as evidence of political acceptance: “Although some country stations refuse to play their music, the Dixie Chicks seem are doing okay. Their new album hit number one in sales on the Billboard charts this week, and also topped the country album charts. Either their fans don’t care about the trio’s politics — or they do care, and the Chicks are more popular than President Bush.”
Yet, as a recent Reuters report notes, this is far from clear. All emphases added:
Country trio the Dixie Chicks, the darlings of Nashville until their singer criticized President Bush three years ago, opened at No. 1 on the U.S. charts on Wednesday with their first studio album since then, but sales were sharply lower. “Taking The Long Way,” their third chart-topper, sold 525,000 copies in the week ended May 28, according to tracking firm Nielsen SoundScan. The figure ranks as one of the biggest openings of the year, and exceeds industry expectations by more than 100,000 copies. But it paled against the 780,000 copies that their last studio release, “Home,” sold during its first week in August 2002. It spent three weeks at No. 1, and has sold 5.8 million copies to date. In April another country trio, Rascal Flatts, opened at No. 1 with 722,000 copies of its new album.
The lower sales for the new Dixie Chicks album were not unexpected given that country radio is largely ignoring the Texans. The first single, the defiant “Not Ready To Make Nice,” stalled at No. 36 on Billboard magazine’s Hot Country Songs chart.
On the other hand, the trio has garnered plenty of attention in the mainstream media, with a Time magazine cover story, and a segment on CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes.”
All the attention — or lack thereof — stems from a throwaway comment made by singer Natalie Maines during a London concert in March 2003. She told the crowd that the band was embarrassed to come from the same state as Bush. If one critic had not mentioned it in his review, she might have gotten away with it, but it quickly escalated into a major incident.
Radio stations stopped playing their songs and organized public destructions of their discs, sales slumped, death threats ensued, and country stars like Toby Keith bashed them. The women have largely laid low in the past few years to focus on their expanding families, and recording the new album in Los Angeles with rock producer Rick Rubin.
At this stage, it’s possible the Dixie Chicks are abandoning their country music base, rather than the other way around. Rubin is best known for his work with funk-rock band the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who had ruled the charts for the previous two weeks, and with deceased Nashville renegade Johnny Cash.
“I’d rather have a smaller following of really cool people who get it, who will grow with us as we grow and are fans for life, than people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith,” Dixie Chick Martie Maguire told Time. We don’t want those kinds of fans.”
So, while the Chicks are still quite successful by any measure, they’ve become alienated from a large part of their “base” and are now crossing over into pop with the help of tremendous media exposure. That’s fine–and I applaud them standing by their views, even one’s I find insipid, rather than caving to pressure–but hardly evidence that their former fans admire their politics.
That they are more popular than President Bush, though, is quite likely. Then again, who isn’t?
Meanwhile, Chris Lawrence observes, “Things are clearly topsy-turvy when Michelle Branch has gone country while the Dixie Chicks have gone rock-and-roll. Not that the two genres are all that distinct these days, mind you (or, for that matter, historically).”
________
Related stories:
OTB
|
|
