Newsmakers have a tradition of dumping news they don’t want you to know on the evening before a weekend. If they can line it up with a three-day holiday, even better. However, for your morning cup of red-white-and-blue coffee with a little “hangover cure” splashed in, we provide just what they would prefer we didn’t do: the stories you weren’t meant to read.

• Tim Montgomery admits to selling heroin for fun and profit - He kites checks; he deals heroin; he takes steriods. He can’t seem to sprint away from anything, now can he?
• President Bush will attend the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies - It sounds like a yawner, but yawners don’t get dropped as the last sentence of a briefing about a Thailand trip on the night before the Fourth weekend. Some see it as tacit approval for all China’s perceived sins; others see it as an acknowledgment of China’s economic power. We see a lame duck president finally taking that vacation he never got to take because of all that time he spent working hard.

• The prosecution of the BALCO case delayed the 2004 MLB drug testing program into July because of record seizures, according to MLB and MLBPA - It’s hard to run a program with a promise of privacy if the government will show up to collect your urine while it’s still warm. Sen. Henry Waxman’s not making any friends, but he’s made it this far without them.
• Jeff Francoeur is off to the minors to work on putting a bat on a baseball thrown near him - Why embarrass the kid with the news if they don’t have to? Except, of course, every Atlanta barbecue over the next three days will include the following conversation: “So’d ya hear that Francoeur got sent down?” Still, it’s not PTI.
• Roger Clemens’ DNA will be on syringes that his trainer buddy saved for seven years - Frankly, we don’t know why Brian McNamee’s lawyers would want to bury this news since they can’t keep out of the media to save their client’s butt. However, we thank them in this case.