Amid growing concerns that a pre-sale environmental assessment could scuttle or complicate the proposed sale of Harrisburg incinerator, officials involved in various capacities with the deal appear to be doing their best to ignore or skate around the issue and change the subject.

In March, The Inquirer reported that Rapaport received an $821,000 referral fee in 2012 after a Philadelphia law firm successfully settled a multimillion-dollar medical-malpractice case…

“What we disclosed was of great public interest, of great importance in a democracy, that the U.S. government is building this massive spying apparatus aimed at its own population,” Greenwald said Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

WALL STREET JOURNAL: [Edward] Snowden and other private employees with permission to plug directly into National Security Agency systems have unprecedented access to highly sensitive information—the result of years of pressure to break down the walls dividing U.S. intelligence agencies and share information that might expose the next terror plot.

The question of whether other countries can replicate North America’s success in drilling in shale rocks has captivated geologists and diplomats. US crude imports are at a 16-year low, reconfiguring the map of global oil trade…

The Department of Justice, in the latest development in a complex back-and-forth over access to the morning-after pill, notified U.S. District Judge Edward Korman it will submit a plan for compliance. If he approves it, the department will drop its appeal of his April ruling.

NEW YORK TIMES: … [Universal Studios Hollywood] has introduced a $299 V.I.P. ticket, just in time for the summer high season, that comes with valet parking, breakfast in a luxury lounge, special access to Universal’s back lot, unlimited line-skipping and a fancy lunch.

TRUTH OUT: Early in the morning of July 16, 1979, a 20-foot section of the earthen dam blocking the waste pool for the Church Rock Uranium Mill in New Mexico caved in and released 95 million gallons of highly acidic fluid containing 1,100 tons of radioactive material.

HARRISBURG PATRIOT-NEWS Column: …Filing for Chapter 9 bankruptcy has been an appealing solution for some. City Controller Dan Miller has been an advocate of that option.

NEW YORK TIMES: It was once common for elementary-school teachers to arrange their classrooms by ability, placing the highest-achieving students in one cluster, the lowest in another. But ability grouping and its close cousin, tracking, in which children take different classes based on their proficiency levels, fell out of favor in the late 1980s and the 1990s as critics charged that they perpetuated inequality by trapping poor and minority students in low-level groups.

WE.CONNECT.DOTS: When Democratic State Committee meets this coming weekend at Lancaster next year’s governor campaign grabs center stage. Current PA Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, has been referred to as the “most vulnerable” governor in America. GQ magazine calls Corbett “dead Governor walking.”

FINANCIAL TIMES: The Obama administration came under mounting bipartisan pressure on Sunday to scale back electronic surveillance following revelations last week that have raised new questions about government intrusion into citizens’ privacy.

Early this year the Pew Charitable Trusts released the results of a two-year research project on the type of lending at issue. The report found that, because the average borrower can’t pay back a typical $375 loan within the prescribed two-week period, he ends up taking eight loans over five months that result in the $375 loan costing $520.