As coal mine smolders, U.S. town lingers
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CENTRALIA, Pennsylvania  - Mayor John Lokitis sits peaceably in his living room, portraits of coal miners from his family adorning the walls. A coal-burning stove from the 1940s pushes back the freezing air.
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Two towns, one in Michigan and one in Kentucky, show the effects as the U.S. auto industry, and the prosperity that accompanies it, shifts to the south.
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An Appalachian town enjoys an economic boom as US soldiers go shopping for rugged apparel.
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Huddling near a gas heater in the mayor&#39;s office of this small town near Bethlehem, Fatah campaign manager Atef Rabaya is still reeling.
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By Evan Osnos, Chicago Tribune  Mar. 12--LINFEN, China -- Here in one of the world's most polluted cities, where coal dust blackens apples still on the branch, something new is in the air.   It's not the brown smoke chugging out of coke plants and iron smelters day and night.
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MERERANI, Tanzania  - The orange sun sets over the  Tanzanian mining town of Mererani as pick-up trucks take the  night shift to pits producing blue Tanzanite gemstones, and  tired workers trudge home in the opposite direction.
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A shortage of natural gas besets the state's most populous area. In rural outposts, energy costs spike.
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People here believe in miracles. Small ones, where a kind word or a soft touch can make all the difference. Big ones, too &#151; like finding six men in a collapsed mountain mine nearly three weeks after they were trapped.
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By Mike Joseph, The Centre Daily Times, State College, Pa.  Dec. 11--BENNER TOWNSHIP -- The size and makeup of the crowd jammed into Benner Township's remote municipal building last Thursday reflected the new importance that's fallen to the land here.
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Appalachian State's monumental upset of No. 5 Michigan on Saturday sent a remote small town in the mountains of northwestern North Carolina into a frenzy of the kind that Boone, population 13,000, had never seen before.
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A dusty gravel driveway leads to an old house once occupied by an Appalachian family. Next door is a little shack that sells hot dogs and ice cream, and a few miles away is a series of coal processing plants.
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Black lung disease is posing a greater threat to coal miners in far southwest Virginia, and scientists aren't sure why.
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More than 30 years ago, an abandoned mine in Pennsylvania coal country was turned into a dump for toxic waste. Lots of it
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Enslaved by a rising demand for energy, China is struggling to rid itself of thousands of small and deadly mines that make its coal industry the most dangerous in the world.
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Environmentalists are fighting a proposal to build another coal-fired power plant in the Four Corners area, saying the region cannot handle more pollution.
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More than five weeks after hundreds perished in the seizure of School No. 1 by Chechen separatists, Beslan remains a town reeling from grief, shock, rage and disbelief, a town whose suffering seems only compounded by the day.
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BENTON, Ill. -- In 2004, as a state legislator running for the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama came to this small town 300 miles from Chicago to pledge support for southern Illinois' struggling coal country.