Word: potomac
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...mines close eventually, of course, but until recently the Potomac Complex in West Virginia's Grant County seemed protected by its solid marriage to Virginia Power's Mount Storm generating station. It was built on a tortured, windswept plateau in the mid-1960s only because abundant coal was nearby. The coal was worth mining, in turn, only because Mount Storm would burn it. Tipple and boiler were linked by a two-mile covered conveyor belt that carried coal from the east portal of the mine straight to the storage silos of the power plant. The miners still marvel...
...still coal. But deregulation also means the arrival of cost cutting as religion, the stern faith that has propelled the U.S. economy to its current world-beating performance. The strongest economy in the world is as strong as it has ever been. But as the brutal tale of the Potomac mines illustrates, this prosperity is not about abundance but about taking bigger risks with smaller margins in a winner-take-all competition. This is a story about pennies--about how a difference of cents on a ton of coal in a local bidding war can imperil a small town...
Until the beginning of this year, Consolidation Coal Group of Pittsburgh, owner of the Potomac mines, had a contract to sell 1.5 million tons of coal a year to Virginia Power. Mettiki, the only other high-volume producer in the area, had a contract for a million tons, including some extracted from right beneath Highway 50. With both contracts due to expire on Jan. 1, the utility saw a chance to pit the two against each other in an all-or-nothing bid to be the plant's major coal supplier. It asked both Consol and Mettiki...
...Newseum--an interactive museum dedicated to the history of journalism and (evidently) the propagation of stupid puns--just opened in Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from Washington. There was a lot of fanfare, as there always is when journalists gather to celebrate themselves. The Freedom Forum sank $50 million into the Newseum, and it shows. You can't turn around without bumping into some shiny chunk of high-tech hardware: touch-screen computers, Cinerama-style theaters and a video wall so large--126 ft. long, 10 1/2 ft. high--that it could theoretically accommodate 300 couch potatoes at the same...
Notwithstanding their credentials as fighters against a government Washington loves to hate, the N.C.R. and the N.L.A. have no backing on the banks of the Potomac. Clinton Administration officials stand by a 1994 State Department report that accuses Massoud Rajavi and other People's Mujahedin leaders of terror against the U.S. in the 1970s. The report goes on to charge that the group still has Marxist leanings, strong ties to Saddam Hussein and few democratic tendencies. "There is a cult of personality around Massoud and Maryam Rajavi that is unhealthy," says Michael Eisenstadt, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute...