Owner of W.Va. coal mine agrees to pay $209 million penalty for fatal explosion
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on December 7th, 2011 5:42 am by HL
Owner of W.Va. coal mine agrees to pay $209 million penalty for fatal explosion
The owner of a rogue coal mine in West Virginia — where sparking machinery and built-up gases led to an explosion that killed 29 men last year — has agreed to pay a record $209 million penalty and make historic changes to protect miners from harm, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.
The settlement with Virginia-based Alpha Natural Resources, which bought the parent company of the mine, Massey Energy, is more than 40 times the size of any previous fine for a coal disaster. It came 20 months after the blast at the Upper Big Branch mine, the worst U.S. mining disaster in 40 years.
House panel debates bill that would limit lawmakers’ stock trades
A deeply divided House committee debated Tuesday whether to pass a high-profile bill that would prohibit members of Congress from buying and selling stocks based on non-public information they learn about through their work on Capitol Hill.
Several panel members — backed in part by the testimony of a Securities and Exchange Commission official — said the measure is not needed because existing laws and congressional ethics rules ban such action. They also said they worry that the bill, known as the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, could be used to unfairly tarnish members.
Gingrich fighting massive debt racked up in campaign’s extravagant early days
Even as he surges ahead in the polls, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is struggling to get out from under a mountain of debt from luxury jets and other pricey expenses racked up in the early weeks of his campaign.
Creditors say Gingrich has begun paying back nearly $1.2 million in bills he owed at the end of September, and his spokesman says most will be taken care of by the end of the year. Other debts — including $42,000 owed to Gingrich himself for the campaign’s use of a mailing list — have already been paid, ahead of those owed to other vendors, according to aides and disclosure records.
Obama invokes Teddy Roosevelt in speech attacking GOP policies
OSAWATOMIE, Kan. — President Obama came to this tiny middle American town Tuesday to invoke the spirit of a long-ago Republican president in a speech that laid out, in his sharpest language yet, the economic and social arguments he will probably use against Republicans in 2012.
Obama called for a return to modest, middle-class values and said the recent rise in populist anger — from the tea party movement to the Occupy Wall Street protests — was evidence of the need to remedy the growing economic inequality in American life.
