Ice

On Tuesday, you could have played football on ice skates or gone cross- country skiing on the unplowed tundra that was Veterans Stadium's playing surface. Yesterday, there was a major breakthrough, following a day of plowing and ice chopping by city work crews. There was green to be seen. And yard lines. Unfortunately, plenty of ice remained visible on the artificial turf, which workers said would be softened, chopped and removed in time for the Eagles to work out inside the stadium today, as planned.

Glaciers may appear to be immobile, but they flow like highly viscous rivers, an improbable quality that Paula Winokur has captured in the porcelain sculptures she's showing at Helen Drutt Gallery. This series, inspired by a trip to Alaska, consists of wall-mounted and free-standing pieces. Typically, they juxtapose smooth, faceted sections with a furrowed part that suggests weathered ice moving down a slope. Although the sculptures are all white, Winokur has enlivened them by created several striking contrasts.

Mario Lemieux has told friends and family he's returning to the Pittsburgh Penguins. He'll tell the world today. Lemieux's return to the sport he dominated as a four-time NHL scoring champion reportedly will be announced in a news conference that might detail how many games he plans to play next season. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Lemieux's return yesterday. Lemieux, who will be 30 in October, sat out the 1994-95 season to rest up following five years of persistent back problems, a bout with Hodgkin's disease and anemia.

The manufacturer of ice that may have sickened more than 5,000 people in the Delaware Valley has resumed production after a voluntary shutdown, according to an official with the Food and Drug Administration in Philadelphia. Robert McCullough, the FDA's acting director of investigations, said Nolt's Ice Company had resumed production after it shut down its New Holland, Lancaster County, plant on Sept. 29. The first victims of the contaminated ice became sick within two days of the Sept.

A new and more dangerous form of an illegal drug that plagued Philadelphia in the early 1980s is making a comeback in Hawaii and on the West Coast. The emergence of "ice," a clear, solid form of methamphetamine that can be inhaled when heated, has the public health and safety community worried that the drug may spread if cocaine becomes less available, opening a new chapter in the nation's drug crisis. "Ice potentially poses a grave health and crime threat to our entire nation," said Rep. Lawrence Coughlin, R-Pa.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported people with no criminal history and who posed no threat to the public or national security, according to a report by the American Immigration Lawyers Association. The report, "Immigration Enforcement Off Target: Minor Offenses With Major Consequences," is a compilation of 200 cases nationwide of immigrant clients who were arrested by local law enforcement and eventually detained by ICE. According to the report, released Tuesday, nine of those clients were from Pennsylvania, two have been deported, one left voluntarily and six cases are still pending - including one in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia's proximity to the Schuylkill and the Delaware River allowed its mills to easily load goods onto ships and sell the stuff somewhere else - a huge business advantage in the 1820s. But here's the problem with tying your prosperity to the rivers: Ice. At the time, Philadelphia wasn't a national manufacturing center - it was the national manufacturing center, the "Workshop of the World" long before anyone hung that tag on the city. It produced everything from rough sails to fine glasswork, traded with everyone from Cuba to China.

Slippery steps, slick streets and frozen windshields greeted commuters this morning after an overnight freezing rain coated the Philadelphia area with a sheet of ice. The two- to four-inch snowstorm predicted for the Delaware Valley sometime after rush hour yesterday never materialized. But the light, steady freezing rain was just as bad, as it coated roadways with a thin, almost invisible layer of ice. "The ground air was cold, but there was a thick layer of warm air about 1,000 feet up," explained Accu-Weather meteorologist Chuck Jones.

Four people had driven from the nation's capital, just to climb the ice in northern Bucks County. An international economist. A federal energy lawyer. A federal climatologist. An electrical engineer. Five other folks had come from around the Philadelphia region. There, on Saturday morning, along an uninhabited stretch of River Road between Upper Black Eddy and Kintnersville, there was a line reminiscent of Saturdays at the supermarket. All for the ice that lay like cake icing down the steep staircase that rockfalls had formed.