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Lisa Hillary has joined Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia as the Flyers reporter. She replaces John Boruk, who has becomes a full-time anchor and reporter. Hillary spent three seasons as CSN Mid-Atlantic's Capitals reporter. She previously worked as a reporter and anchor with several major television outlets in Canada, where she spent time covering the NHL for two national sports networks, The Sports Network (TSN) and The Score. Boruk spent four seasons as CSN's Flyers reporter.

PHILADELPHIA Police yesterday met with Fox 29 reporter Claudia Gomez and a criminal-defense attorney representing her regarding alleged removal of ID cards belonging to Jean McIntosh from the Tacony house where McIntosh lived, Philly.com reported. Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey wants a grand jury to look into the alleged incident, the website's "The Gossip with Marnie Hall" said. Meanwhile, CBS 3 reported last night that cops are looking into the possibility that Linda Ann Weston might be linked to the 2005 death of a woman in Castor Gardens.

Daily News staffer Julie Knipe Brown was honored last night by the Philadelphia Firefighters Union, Local 22, for her series of stories on hepatitis-C. With Brown are union president George Casey (left) and vice president Tom O'Drain.

Robert A. Thomas, 75, a trailblazing reporter with The Philadelphia Inquirer who went on to a career in the foreign service, died of heart failure Dec. 21 at his home in Folsom, Calif. In 1952, Mr. Thomas joined the staff of The Inquirer as a copyboy. Two years later, he wrote a story about a black street gang and was promoted to staff reporter. "He was the first black reporter to work at The Inquirer," said Inquirer Associate Editor and columnist Acel Moore, who joined the paper in 1962.

I GUESS THE LIBERAL press will be building it own "wailing wall" because of one reporter asking President Obama a question. All the reporters there chased him down to the Washington Monument, like the villagers going after Frankenstein's monster. I suppose they forgot how they hounded Richard Nixon, or Sam Donaldson yelling questions at Ronald Reagan, probably even as he was trying to go to the bathroom. They say Richard Nixon broke the law, but not as much as Obama has tried to destroy our Constitution.

Gaeton Fonzi, 76, an investigative reporter for Philadelphia Magazine from 1959 to 1972 who later published his own conspiracy theory of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died Thursday, Aug. 30, of Parkinson's disease at his home in Satellite Beach, Fla. "He was relentless," D. Herbert Lipson, chairman of Metrocorp, owner of Philadelphia and Boston Magazines, recalled. That intensity carried on after Mr. Fonzi left Philadelphia. "His whole obsession was the Kennedy assassination," Marie, his wife of 55 years, said.

A reporter for the liberal online news service OpEdNews filed suit Thursday in U.S. District Court alleging that Philadelphia police improperly targeted her for arrest during a demonstration against military recruiting at Franklin Mills Mall in 2009. The demonstration attracted counter-demonstrators, and the two groups were monitored by the Philadelphia Police Department's Civil Affairs Unit. Photographer and writer Cheryl Biren-Wright said she was taking photographs for the news service when police singled her out from among other media representatives, seized her camera, and placed her under arrest.

Doris B. Wiley, 91, a Philadelphia newspaper reporter for more than 40 years who covered hard news with the best of them, "interviewed" Morris the cat of 9Lives cat food fame, and parachuted from a plane to write about a New Jersey flight school, died of pancreatic cancer Monday at Paoli Hospital. She was a longtime resident of Rosemont. Born in 1916, the former Doris Boyer was the daughter of Mabel and Carl Boyer - he was director of the Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia.

Murrey Marder, 93, a Washington Post reporter whose tenacious coverage of Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusade foreshadowed the senator's downfall and disgrace, died March 11 at the Washington Home hospice. The cause was complications from a stroke last month, said his nephew Steve Marder. Mr. Marder's career spanned nearly eight decades, including World War II service in the South Pacific as a Marine Corps combat correspondent. He joined the Washington Post in 1946 and distinguished himself on the so-called Red Beat, the sensational trials and hearings about the alleged communist infiltration of government, Hollywood, and other industries.

William J. "Bill" Storm, perhaps the greatest "house-end" reporter who ever worked in Philadelphia, died Saturday of a stroke. He was 76 and lived in Roxborough and in Daytona, Fla. Bill Storm, a police reporter for 36 years for the old Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, was a maestro of the "house-ender. " That is a reporter knocking on the door of a grief-stricken family to get facts that puts faces and feelings into a story about tragedy. He was aggressive, smart and fast, but didn't fit the public's stereotype of the probing reporter - he was a gentleman.

ALUMINUM BASEBALL bats, frying pans and bullhorns made 7th and Arch streets one noisy corner yesterday, as dozens of activists gathered outside the Federal Detention Center to protest arrests they said were made at a marijuana event Saturday. "No victim, no crime," the crowd chanted on Arch Street as prisoners tapped on the narrow windows above. According to the group of protesters, two men were being held at the detention center after being arrested Saturday afternoon at a monthly event at Independence Mall called the "Smokedown Prohibition.

BEIRUT - Hezbollah was pulled more deeply into Syria's civil war as 28 guerrillas from the Lebanese Shiite militant group were killed and dozens wounded while fighting rebels, Syria activists said Monday. The intense battle drove rebels from large parts of the town of Qusair, part of a withering government offensive aimed at securing a strategic land corridor from Damascus to the Mediterranean coast. Hezbollah-affiliated hospitals in Lebanon urged blood donations through mosque loudspeakers and ambulances raced along the Damascus road in a stark indication of the group's increasingly prominent role in Syria.

WASHINGTON - In another case of the Obama administration's investigating classified information improperly disclosed to reporters, the government is prosecuting a State Department expert on North Korea in a probe that appears to step into uncharted territory - by declaring that a journalist is committing a crime in disclosing leaked information. During the investigation of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, law enforcement officials obtained a search warrant for some private e-mails of James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News.

THE NFL, with the OK of the players union, is seriously contemplating moving the draft until sometime in May, ESPN reported, citing league sources. USA Today, citing a source, said Radio City Music Hall in New York is booked for the final weekend in April, when the draft is traditionally held. Also, ESPN reported that the start of the new league year likely would be moved to before the February scouting combine to allow free agents more time to sign with new teams. In other NFL news: * NFL owners will vote on the sites of the 50th and 51st Super Bowls today at their spring meetings.

When it comes to credit issues and identity theft, I sometimes feel like what we used to call a broken record. Almost incessantly, I urge readers to check their credit reports by visiting www.annualcreditreport.com or by calling 1-877-322-8228. Both will get you to the "central source" mandated by Congress a decade ago for consumers to request free reports from TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax, the nation's three main credit bureaus. If the reports are clean, I tell readers, there's no need to pay for a credit score - which Congress, alas, did not require the credit bureaus to provide, and did not bar them from pitching via side deals to consumers who request their free reports.

NEW YORK - Investors nudged the stock market to all-time highs Wednesday despite a handful of disappointing economic reports. Google's stock topped $900 for the first time after the company announced several upgrades to its Android software for smartphones, and Macy's rose after beating Wall Street's profit estimates. Apple fell, holding back the Nasdaq composite index. The market got off to a weak start, then turned higher in late morning trading. Investors shrugged off a slowdown in manufacturing last month.

Federal weather forecasts for Hurricane Sandy were exceptionally accurate last fall, but the warnings themselves were confusing, an internal review has found. The gigantic October storm lost tropical characteristics hours before landfall in New Jersey, so the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stopped calling it a hurricane. Instead it shifted its focus to flooding and high-wind warnings, and moved responsibility from the National Hurricane Center in Miami to local weather offices.

Bill O'Brien was angry. His voice rose often Wednesday on a conference call with reporters. Some folks swore they could feel the spittle through the phone. The Penn State coach spent much of a 20-minute call blasting a Sports Illustrated report implying that medical care for Nittany Lions football players had diminished because of recent changes that included the removal of Wayne Sebastianelli as head physician of the program, a post he held for 21 years. The story, which appears in SI's May 20 issue, also portrayed a rivalry between Sebastianelli and current athletic director Dave Joyner, an orthopedic surgeon who lost out to Sebastianelli in 1992 when the university created the position of head physician of the football program at the urging of Joe Paterno.

I RESPECT the right of the Daily News editorial board to question or criticize my office's reports and audits, but the attack on our evaluation of the city's new Actual Value Initiative (AVI) property-tax system went beyond normal criticism in questioning my motives for issuing the report. Considering that nearly 20 percent of General Fund revenue comes from property taxes, and that AVI represents a major revision of our property-tax system, I believe that my office has a responsibility to the citizens of Philadelphia to evaluate whether the new assessments are accurate and whether the new system is fair.

WASHINGTON - Senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early as 2011, according to a draft of an inspector general's report obtained by the Associated Press that seemingly contradicts public statements by the IRS commissioner. The IRS apologized Friday for what it acknowledged was "inappropriate" targeting of conservative political groups during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status. The agency blamed low-level employees, saying no high-level officials were aware.