Explosion At a Coal Mine killed 25 Workers

MONTCOAL, W.Va. – An explosion at a remote coal mine with a history of safety problems killed 25 workers and at least four others were still missing early Tuesday more than a thousand feet underground in the worst U.S. mine disaster since 1984.

Rescuers had been making their way to the area where the miners were believed trapped at Massey Energy Co.'s sprawling Upper Big Branch mine, where the blast occurred around 3 p.m. Monday. However, safety officials said at a news conference that the search was suspended because rising methane gas levels in the mine made it a high risk for another explosion.

Earlier, Kevin Stricklin, an administrator for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, said officials hoped some of the missing survived the initial blast and were able to reach airtight chambers stocked with food, water and enough oxygen for them to live for four days. However, rescue teams made it to one of two nearby shelters and it was empty. The gas levels prevented them from reaching the second.



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Stranded Ship

SYDNEY (Reuters) – A stranded Chinese coal ship leaking oil onto Australia's Great Barrier Reef is an environmental time bomb with the potential to devastate large protected areas of the reef, activists said on Monday.

The ship was a "ticking environmental time bomb," Gilly Llewellyn, director of conservation for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Australia, told Reuters.

She said this was the third major international incident involving its owners in four years.

Australian government officials say the stricken Shen Neng I belongs to the Shenzhen Energy Group, a subsidiary of China's state-owned China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company, better known by its acronym COSCO.

In 2007, COSCO was linked to a major oil spill in San Francisco bay, while last year it was tied to another in Norway, both of which damaged environmentally sensitive areas.

"We are seeing a concerning pattern potentially associated with this company," Llewellyn told Reuters.

COSCO officials in Australia could not be contacted for comment on Monday.

The Great Barrier Reef stretches along Australia's northeastern coast and is the only living structure on Earth visible from space. It is the world's largest coral reef and a major tourist draw.

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Shocking Disaster

NUKUS, Uzbekistan – The drying up of the Aral Sea is one of the planet's most shocking environmental disasters, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday as he urged Central Asian leaders to step up efforts to solve the problem.

Once the world's fourth-largest lake, the sea has shrunk by 90 percent since the rivers that feed it were largely diverted in a Soviet project to boost cotton production in the arid region.

The shrunken sea has ruined the once-robust fishing economy and left fishing trawlers stranded in sandy wastelands, leaning over as if they dropped from the air. The sea's evaporation has left layers of highly salted sand, which winds can carry as far away as Scandinavia and Japan, and which plague local people with health troubles.

Ban toured the sea by helicopter as part of a visit to the five countries of former Soviet Central Asia. His trip included a touchdown in Muynak, Uzbekistan, a town once on the shore where a pier stretches eerily over gray desert and camels stand near the hulks of stranded ships.

"On the pier, I wasn't seeing anything, I could see only a graveyard of ships," Ban told reporters after arriving in Nukus, the nearest sizable city and capital of the autonomous Karakalpak region.

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