Word: minke
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Lillie Hamilton can look out the back window of her boxy clapboard house in Mink Branch, Ky., and see the family business, a small coal mine burrowed into the hillside. One chill morning last month, seven men-including three of her sons and a grandson-were wedged 700 ft. down a narrow tunnel, crawling on their knees and blasting loose great chunks of bituminous coal with an explosive gel. Suddenly, a monstrous explosion shattered the Appalachian quiet. The Joyce Ann shaft (named for a Hamilton widow) had become a quarter-mile-long cannon, and the men inside fodder...
...more a year in the 1940s. The improvement came from both technological advances and more stringent standards enforced by the Government since 1973. But now the trend has taken a troubling upswing: mine mishaps killed 106 men in 1978, 133 in 1980 and 155 last year. The Mink Branch disaster was one of seven major Kentucky mining accidents in seven weeks; since the first of the year, 31 U.S. coal miners have been killed on the job. Says Willard Stanley, Kentucky's Commissioner of Mines and Minerals: "Something is going wrong...
MSHA has not yet issued its findings on the Mink Branch tragedy, but Commissioner Stanley, a former miner, thinks that the blasting ignited coal dust suspended in the dank, clammy shaft. "We were very surprised by some of the things we saw in there," Stanley says. "The whole situation was very improper...
...Amneris. In San Francisco last week, the attention and the money (up to $750 for scalpers' tickets) was on the tenor. Of course, the man who was singing Verdi's Egyptian captain for the first time in his career was no ordinary performer: it was the portly mink-coat model, frequent guest on the Tonight show, American Express-card pitchman, would-be movie star and, these days, part-time primissimo tenore. Yes, Giorgio, there is still a Luciano Pavarotti, superstar...
...what Moscow might expect to gain from such tactics. Some observers feel that the immediate target of a Soviet economic squeeze would not be Solidarity and its group of radical leaders but the Polish Communists, who have so far failed to rein in the unruly union. Says Georges Mink, an expert on Poland for the Paris-based Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique: "If the Soviet Union wants to obtain a more conciliatory attitude from the government and make it easier for the hard-liners in the infighting, then the economy is a logical weapon...