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In what couldn’t be a more distressing and shocking start to the year, 12 miners were killed in ICG’s Sago mine in West Virginia (Mine elation turns to devastation). The repercussions from this disaster, as well as the ones to follow, are still being felt as we approach the one year anniversary of Sago.

With Sago fresh in the mind of miners across the US, safety-themed stories were high priority for readers with Retreat Mining: Risky Business?, R&D makes roof bolting safer, and Proactive safety program setting precedent all rating highly among readers.

In Australia coal junior Donaldson Coal entered the development phase of its Tasman bord and pillar mine and sought to progress its Abel mine (Donaldson eyes underground prospects), and Korean firms SK Corp and Korea Resources Corp beat out 11 other competitors to win the rights to explore Queensland's Taroborah coal tenements (Koreans awarded Queensland exploration rights).

While some were looking to develop mines, Centennial announced it wanted to get rid of a few (Centennial looks to sell smaller mines) as it struggled to overcome problems at its Newstan mine (No star for Centennial.)

Anglo Coal was also struggling at its Dartbrook mine and announced in May it would close the mine (Anglo's Dartbrook mine to shut down).

On the feature front, ILN’s Roadway Development ( Keeping development ahead of modern monsters) and Gunnedah Basin (The new frontier) features proved extremely popular.

Ever a prevalent theme, the skills shortage feature was highly read (Skills famine leaves industry hungry for more).

The backbone of our Longwall publications – the mine profiles – were extremely well read with a great line-up for the first half of the year with: Ulan (Ulan’s fat face), Moranbah North (Into the light), Century (Quality and pride key to Century), and Federal (Tried and true at Federal).

Sating the competitive side of the industry were the longwall production statistics (Exclusive Survey: Australian Longwall Mine Production) and related articles (Beltana breaks 7Mt barrier).

On the more technical side of things, strata control was popular with readers with articles such as (Roof fall recovery) and (Managing Goonyella seam geology).