By DENNIS B. RODDY, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Threatening to use a power that it has withheld for 33 years, the Federal Mine Safety and Health Administration has warned 13 mines around the country that they could be cited for a "pattern of violations," a designation opening them to stringent penalties and partial shutdowns.

Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, is a city that turns on the seemingly recession-proof industry of government. But it is headed to state receivership, a victim of a declining tax base and, say its current leaders, longtime fiscal irrationality.

Long familiar with a country accustomed to treating its symptoms rather than the underlying disease, Rosemary Edwards hopes that, with each visit to the ongoing disaster called Haiti, change is getting closer to Haiti.

KENT, Ohio - Forty years after her daughter became a milepost in America's journey through anger and chaos, Doris Krause sat in a second-floor room in this college town and waited for truth to climb the stairs.

"I wonder if anyone will ever own up to anything," she said.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Everywhere the eye turns and the nose sniffs there is ruin and stink, but the ear hears laughter amid the wails.

People, be they living in tents or the few houses untouched by this month's earthquake, invariably smile, even laugh.

ABILENE, Kan. - The 1909 edition of the Abilene High School yearbook included a tradition of the age -- a class "prophecy," in which a member travels in time and writes of his classmates in years to come.

One classmate, in this prophecy, has made it to the very top.

"If Eisenhower is elected president this year, it will make his third term," the time traveler relates.

Mary Travers, whose bell-clear alto defined songs of the folk era, stayed a true believer well into an age when true belief was enough to reduce many to the status of quaint oddity, like some lost soldier found on a South Pacific island, fighting on long past the truce.

About 300 people slunk into this town to bid on the earthly goods of the late Betty James, a woman whose life required as much flexibility and rebound as the spring-steel coil she sprung on a toy-hungry world: the Slinky.

On the lawn of her sprawling Tudor home were nine televisions, three refrigerators, nine mink coats and enough Sinatra-era furniture for a rat pack reunion.

Accused cop-killer Richard Poplawski spent hours posting racist messages on an extremist right-wing Web site, decrying blacks and Latinos and warning of forthcoming economic collapse fueled by the "Zionist occupation" of America, an expert in political extremism has determined. Earlier, he had praised the "AK" rifle as his ideal weapon.

This city once had a steel-based economy and critics now say it has a John Murtha-based economy but, in what used to be the 11-inch rolling mill of Bethlehem Steel, nobody's apologizing.
"You ask where the earmarks go?" said Bill Polacek.