White Paper

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has finalized a process to encourage the use of acid mine drainage for hydraulic fracturing, part of an effort to reduce the use of freshwater in extracting oil and gas from shale. The DEP's white paper says that proposals to use "mine-influenced" water must include sampling and characterization of the water, as well as details about how the water will be transported, stored and used. More than 300 million gallons of water is discharged from abandoned coal mines each day, impairing more than 5,500 miles of Pennsylvania waterways.

Inquirer staff writer Virginia Smith is writing over the coming week from the Philadelphia Flower Show. These posts appeared on her blog, "Kiss the Earth," at philly.com/kisstheearth. Read her stories at philly.com/ginny, and other Flower Show coverage at philly.com/flowershow.   It may be my imagination - been known to happen - but there seem to be an awful lot of white flowers at the show this year. Giant white hydrangeas. Lilies and mums. Roses and roses, great masses of them.

WASHINGTON - President Obama has directed the Justice Department to give Congress' intelligence committees access to classified legal advice providing the government's rationale for drone strikes against American citizens working with al-Qaeda abroad, a senior administration official and Democratic lawmakers said Wednesday. A drumbeat of demands to see the document has swelled on Capitol Hill as the Senate intelligence committee prepares to hold a confirmation hearing Thursday for John Brennan, who helped manage the drone program, to be CIA director.

Philadelphia's economy is declining at a "precipitous rate," says the state agency that oversees the city's budget. In a strongly worded "white paper" released yesterday, the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Agency (PICA) painted a sobering portrait of two insidious long-term trends that city government has been unable to halt. Loss of jobs. And loss of people. The skid in employment and population threatens future budgets, placing city government's ability to pay for fundamental services at risk in coming years, PICA said.

"Anti-immigrant sentiments have unleashed a wave of hate on our communities, and Norristown is no exception," community organizer Carmen Guerrero told residents at a public meeting Wednesday, decrying what she said were worsening relations between the town's Latino population and local police. The gathering of about 50 people at an East Main Street community center was attended by municipal Councilwoman Linda Christian, town administrator David Forrest, and representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice, the NAACP, and the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

A union representing health-care workers is raising more concerns over the proposed restructuring of higher education in New Jersey, including questions about the apportionment of debt between Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. A white paper titled "The Reorganization of UMDNJ: Getting It Right," by the Health Professionals and Allied Employees (HPAE), representing 4,000 nurses, medical researchers, and other health professionals at UMDNJ, poses 65 questions it says need answering before the university could be carved up, with pieces given to Rutgers.

Faced with declining state revenue, Temple University's provost spent the last year looking at ways to cut costs and improve operations, but some educators on campus aren't pleased with his ideas. In a 25-page white paper, Dick Englert laid out a range of possibilities, perhaps the most controversial of which calls for consolidating or merging several schools and departments. The schools of education and communications and theater, the Boyer College of Music and Dance, and the Tyler School of Art were listed as possible candidates.

Recently I stood in the kitchen of our new home, amid hundreds of cardboard boxes, all helpfully labeled BETH, and watched my wife, Beth, open a box. She cut through several layers of tape, opened the box flaps and pulled out an object that had been laboriously wadded up inside roughly 2,000 square feet of white paper. She unwrapped it, layer by layer, until finally she got to the object that had been so carefully protected: a coffee mug. With coffee still in it. If you're wondering why we packed a mug with coffee in it, the answer is, we are not that stupid.

In the Region     Mine drainage proposed for fracking   The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has finalized a process to encourage the use of acid mine drainage for hydraulic fracturing, part of an effort to reduce the use of freshwater in extracting oil and gas from shale. The DEP's white paper says that proposals to use "mine-influenced" water must include sampling and characterization of the water, as well as details about how the water will be transported, stored and used.

At first glance, the staged color photographs of Nadine Rovner and the candid black-and-white ones of Yuichi Hibi, on view in two solo shows at Gallery 339, would seem to have little in common. But a longer look reveals both photographers as exceptionally attuned to the poetry of solitariness. Rovner's pictures of solitary young women in poses suggesting indecision, reflection, and longing are reminiscent of films from the 1950s and '60s that caught the confusion and frustrations of the era's middle-class teenagers so memorably.

Inquirer staff writer Virginia Smith is writing over the coming week from the Philadelphia Flower Show. These posts appeared on her blog, "Kiss the Earth," at philly.com/kisstheearth. Read her stories at philly.com/ginny, and other Flower Show coverage at philly.com/flowershow.   It may be my imagination - been known to happen - but there seem to be an awful lot of white flowers at the show this year. Giant white hydrangeas. Lilies and mums. Roses and roses, great masses of them.

WASHINGTON - President Obama has directed the Justice Department to give Congress' intelligence committees access to classified legal advice providing the government's rationale for drone strikes against American citizens working with al-Qaeda abroad, a senior administration official and Democratic lawmakers said Wednesday. A drumbeat of demands to see the document has swelled on Capitol Hill as the Senate intelligence committee prepares to hold a confirmation hearing Thursday for John Brennan, who helped manage the drone program, to be CIA director.

In the Region     Mine drainage proposed for fracking   The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has finalized a process to encourage the use of acid mine drainage for hydraulic fracturing, part of an effort to reduce the use of freshwater in extracting oil and gas from shale. The DEP's white paper says that proposals to use "mine-influenced" water must include sampling and characterization of the water, as well as details about how the water will be transported, stored and used.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has finalized a process to encourage the use of acid mine drainage for hydraulic fracturing, part of an effort to reduce the use of freshwater in extracting oil and gas from shale. The DEP's white paper says that proposals to use "mine-influenced" water must include sampling and characterization of the water, as well as details about how the water will be transported, stored and used. More than 300 million gallons of water is discharged from abandoned coal mines each day, impairing more than 5,500 miles of Pennsylvania waterways.

Being surrounded by Rose Wylie's huge, messy, colorful paintings is exhilarating, especially if you've heard that Wylie, a British artist, has just turned 78 - and even more so when you notice that most of the work in this exhibition at University of the Arts' Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery dates from the last decade. Wylie lives and works in a village in Kent but her images come from all over the map. Movie stars, fashion models, British royals, cats, dogs, footballers, a robin, and giant supermarket flowers populate her paintings.

"Anti-immigrant sentiments have unleashed a wave of hate on our communities, and Norristown is no exception," community organizer Carmen Guerrero told residents at a public meeting Wednesday, decrying what she said were worsening relations between the town's Latino population and local police. The gathering of about 50 people at an East Main Street community center was attended by municipal Councilwoman Linda Christian, town administrator David Forrest, and representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice, the NAACP, and the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

For the last year and more, U.K. singer Adele has been stampeding through world music charts, with a multimillion-selling album, 21 , that is still in the top five (see below), and terrific torch songs such as "Rolling in the Deep" and "Someone Like You. " It's an emotional, unusually coherent album. What inspired it all? Could a man be involved? Now U.K. rag Heat reveals that the man who broke Adele's heart, alas, inspired the album, boo-hoo, and made her a multi-gobsmacking-rich kind of human lady person, yahoo!

A union representing health-care workers is raising more concerns over the proposed restructuring of higher education in New Jersey, including questions about the apportionment of debt between Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. A white paper titled "The Reorganization of UMDNJ: Getting It Right," by the Health Professionals and Allied Employees (HPAE), representing 4,000 nurses, medical researchers, and other health professionals at UMDNJ, poses 65 questions it says need answering before the university could be carved up, with pieces given to Rutgers.

At first glance, the staged color photographs of Nadine Rovner and the candid black-and-white ones of Yuichi Hibi, on view in two solo shows at Gallery 339, would seem to have little in common. But a longer look reveals both photographers as exceptionally attuned to the poetry of solitariness. Rovner's pictures of solitary young women in poses suggesting indecision, reflection, and longing are reminiscent of films from the 1950s and '60s that caught the confusion and frustrations of the era's middle-class teenagers so memorably.

Faced with declining state revenue, Temple University's provost spent the last year looking at ways to cut costs and improve operations, but some educators on campus aren't pleased with his ideas. In a 25-page white paper, Dick Englert laid out a range of possibilities, perhaps the most controversial of which calls for consolidating or merging several schools and departments. The schools of education and communications and theater, the Boyer College of Music and Dance, and the Tyler School of Art were listed as possible candidates.