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on August 31, 2025
A proposed coal mine at Whitehaven, Cumbria, which was granted the go-ahead by the Government in December, was bitterly opposed by climate-change protesters, in spite of the fact it will not be producing coal for power stations or open fires, only coking coal for steel-making.
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At that time, five-sixths of the world's coal was mined and used in Britain. At the industry's peak in 1913, there were 3,024 deep mines in operation which produced 292 million tons of coal and employed 1.1 million miners.
tion?" Kofman warned that Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov is "exhausting the force with an ill-timed, feckless set of offensive operations, whose gains will not change the strategic picture for Russia, but could leave Russian forces more vu
Reading his homily in a strong and confident voice, Francis said that even when people felt the wellspring of hope had dried up, it was important not to be frozen in a sense of defeat but to seek an "interior resurrection" with God's help.
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osses. "Even if Bakhmut falls, the Russian invasion will fall well short of seizing control of Donetsk Oblast, one of its main territorial objectives", the Washington-based Hudson Institute said in its latest milita
A police source told MailOnline: 'Katie Price was arrested a few weeks ago for breaching a restraining order placed against her following an argument with the fiancée of her former partner, Kieran Hayler.
ICRC spokesman Jason Straziuso said the organization was in contact with Lvova-Belova "in line with its mandate to restore contact between separated families and facilitate reunification where feasible."
Peter's Square and then delivering his twice-annual "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) blessing and message from the central external balcony of St. Peter's Basilica. (Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Christina Fincher)
nable. Kofman said he believed that "the Russian military likely has the manpower and reserves to mount a stubborn defence" against a Ukrainian counter-offensive, with "minefields and trenches" at its
Mykola Kuleba said at a news conference in Kyiv that the children were expected to arrive in the capital later in the day.
Kuleba is the executive director of the Save Ukraine organization and is the presidential commissioner for children's rights.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said this week it had been in contact with Lvova-Belova, the first confirmation of high-level international intervention to reunite families with children who were forcibly deported.
"We may feel helpless and discouraged before the power of evil, the conflicts that tear relationships apart, the attitudes of calculation and indifference that seem to prevail in society, the cancer of corruption, the spread of injustice, the icy winds of war," he said.
The switch from coal-burning to gas, oil and electric heating in British homes has led to sulphur dioxide levels in the air falling by 98 per cent since 1970, and fewer soot particles no more than 2.5 micrometres in diameter by more than three-quarters.
Without it, industrialisation would rapidly have stalled as Britain ran out of water power for its mills and charcoal for its iron production. While coal picked up on the foreshore in County Durham had been shipped to London since medieval times, it was the greedy furnaces of the industrial North in the late 18th Century that really sparked off the industry.
Climate change forced former supporters of the industry into a rapid about-turn, to the point that some now see coal-mining as a crime against humanity, rather than the beating heart of the working class.
The last mainline steam train service ran until 1968. Throughout the 20th Century, coal was the mainstay of electricity generation. And as late as 2012, it still provided nearly half of our electricity.
While householders today worry about the environmental damage committed by cars and wood-burning stoves, the air was filthier back in the 1950s, before air-pollution records were kept, when London smogs blotted out almost all light.
By the time I was born in the 1960s, oil, followed by natural gas, had become the mainstay of home heating.
But still a pall of smoke hung over the older houses in Canterbury, where I grew up. I still associate visits to my grandparents in a Nottinghamshire mining town with an acrid smell that pervaded the countryside for miles.
In 1974, there were still a quarter of a million miners employed in Britain. A decade later, it was down to 130,000, when Arthur Scargill made his fateful decision to take on a much better prepared Conservative government led by Mrs Thatcher.