‘Do you have to be dead?’: US coalminers plead for benefits as black-lung disease cases surge
The Trump administration is moving to boost the coal industry. Photograph: Ricky Carioti for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenA coalmine in Wharton, West Virginia. Even with the supplemental oxygen, he’s severely limited in what he can physically do.In 2014, Armes received notice that the federal black lung benefits he had been receiving for more than three years were being appealed against by a coal operator.
- ▪The Trump administration is moving to boost the coal industry.
- ▪Photograph: Ricky Carioti for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenA coalmine in Wharton, West Virginia.
- ▪Even with the supplemental oxygen, he’s severely limited in what he can physically do.In 2014, Armes received notice that the federal black lung benefits he had been receiving for more than three years were being appealed against by a coal
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — US |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/20/us-coalminers-black-lung-disease |
| Publication time | Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:00:16 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-20T11:08:46.857Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-20T11:08:46.857Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | LweA7zm7gDTP · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A coalmine in Wharton, West Virginia. The Trump administration is moving to boost the coal industry. Photograph: Ricky Carioti for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenA coalmine in Wharton, West Virginia. The Trump administration is moving to boost the coal industry. Photograph: Ricky Carioti for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesUS unions‘Do you have to be dead?’: US coalminers plead for benefits as black-lung disease cases surgeTrump says he digs coal – but pneumoconiosis cases are at a 50-year high, and sick miners are mired in benefit delaysMichael SainatoSun 20 Sep 2026 07.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 20 Sep 2026 07.01 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleFor 38 years, Josh Armes worked as a coal miner in West Virginia and Virginia.After retirement, Armes, 74,…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — US.
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