Coal Dust

More than 300 dockworkers and environmentalists protested alleged safety hazards at a new coal exporting facility at the Port of Los Angeles on Monday as Mayor Richard Riordan and officials from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers celebrated a massive dredging and landfill project nearby. The dredging project, the largest in the nation, is the cornerstone of a $650-million program designed to accommodate a predicted doubling of cargo through the port in the next 20 years.

The federal agency charged with ensuring mine safety failed to enforce laws that might have prevented the Upper Big Branch mine explosion that killed 29 coal miners and seriously injured two others, according to an independent assessment of the 2010 incident. If the Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration had enforced existing safety laws in a timely manner, “it would have lessened the chances of - and possibly could have prevented - the explosion,” a four-person panel of mine safety experts concluded.

This historic port city was once touted by the Colombian government as the next Acapulco, with its scenic bay, white sand beaches, colonial history and the eco-tourism potential of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, home to one of the largest and oldest pre-Columbian settlements in the Americas. Then came the coal dust. "It covers the plants, the furniture, enters the reception area and even the rooms," said Leonor Gomez Gonzalez, owner of the beachfront Park Hotel. "It's a permanent condition.

The lives of Jargal and her family are black with coal. Coal collects in the creases in their burnished faces, gathers under their fingernails and pits their skin. Coal dust stiffens their hair and clothes. It shifts when a draft cuts across their stone floor. For the family, coal is home: They live in the crumbling workings of a former state-run mine, eating, sleeping--even dreaming--among the spent, decaying hulks of an industrial center gone bust.

***BRUCE HORNSBY & THE RANGE. "Scenes From the Southside." RCA. It's not Bruce Hornsby's fault that he came to be the perfect flagship artist for one of the worst radio formats of all time--you know, that "wave" of FM mediocrity that segues from bad new-age music into bad pop/jazz into bad soft-rock. His blend was smooth, true, but he didn't intend it as background music for tofu parties.

WASHINGTON - The former president of a Massey coal mine in West Virginia was charged with conspiracy to violate federal mining safety laws Wednesday, and federal authorities said he was expected to plead guilty in a widening criminal investigation that began after a 2010 explosion killed 29 miners. David C. Hughart, former president of Massey's Green Valley Resource Group, was charged in U.S. District Court in Beckley, W.Va., with a felony on allegations of tipping off mine officials in advance of federal safety inspections.

This year an epic fight is brewing along the West Coast, one that may make as much difference to the future of our climate as anything that happens in Washington, D.C., and one that may also serve as a decisive battle in defining the U.S. relationship with China. Nature left a lot of coal in the Powder River Basin of southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming. The region produces as much coal as all of Appalachia; its Black Thunder Mine is the nation's largest. Most of this coal takes a long train trip southeast to fuel many of the nation's power plants.

Though the notion of Three Romes is at least five centuries old, the tenuous linkage had all but lapsed, submerged in a welter of glaringly obvious differences. Intrigued by the idea that Moscow, Constantinople and Rome may still have crucial points in common, Fraser attempts to revive a connection among the three cities; "each one desirous of ruling the world and establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth."

WASHINGTON -- On Wednesday, the Mitt Romney campaign released an ad spotlighting President Obama's putative "War On Coal," despite a controversy in Ohio about the coal miners' rally featured in the spot. In the ad, Romney appears on a stage before rows of hard-hatted miners, their faces smudged with coal dust, as he says, “We have 250 years of coal. Why wouldn't we use it?” The rally was held last month in Beallsville, Ohio, thick with miners from the Century coal mine, owned by Murray Energy, a major donor to Republican causes.