The Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA -- Amid all the fuss over the water and chemicals consumed in hydraulic fracturing, few people pay attention to the other ingredient used in fracking a gas well: sand.

But John R. Hellmann does.

Long before the Marcellus Shale natural gas boom hit Pennsylvania, Hellmann and Barry Scheetz, Pennsylvania State University engineering professors, were consumed with researching "proppants" -- the stuff pumped into oil and gas wells to prop open the tiny cracks created during fracking. The most common proppant is sand.

Many Americans probably wonder why President Obama didn't call Wednesday for a bigger troop pullout from Afghanistan.

Having recently returned from Afghanistan and Pakistan, I think he could have made a stronger case for his decision to bring home only 10,000 troops by the end of this year. (The rest of the 33,000 "surge" troops he has deployed will return no later than September 2012, with a full transition to Afghan security control supposedly occurring by 2014.)

WASHINGTON — A tugboat officer, focused on his cellphone and laptop, allowed his tug to push a 250-foot barge into a stranded tourist vessel on the Delaware River in July, killing two people and highlighting a growing problem with distracted operators on land, sea, and air, the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday.

In the waning minutes of last week's Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney was opining about Afghanistan when he uttered something that, in past years, would have been condemned by virtually all Republicans as dovish blasphemy.

He said: "I also think we've learned that our troops shouldn't go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation."

On nights when he is not at home, John Kruk calls his son, Kyle, in Florida to talk baseball before Kyle goes to bed.

"We'll just start talking situations," said Kruk, the former Phillie who works now as a baseball analyst for ESPN. "He'll ask me about a situation, a play, about this, about that, about the Phillies game."

With Father's Day on Sunday, Kruk said this week as his August induction in the Phillies Wall of Fame was announced that the honor meant more to him because Kyle and his daughter, Kiera, could appreciate it now. Kyle's already taken a liking to the game his father played.

PHILADELPHIA -- In his later years, John Eleuthere du Pont believed he was the Dalai Lama, Jesus Christ and a Russian czar, according to court documents filed by a niece and nephew seeking to overturn the eccentric millionaire's will.

He also believed that he was a top CIA consultant and the target of assassins, and that angry Republicans had killed Olympic wrestler David Schultz, the man du Pont murdered, according to a petition filed by William H. du Pont and Beverly Austin du Pont Gaugger.