Alpha Natural Resources is closing a northern West Virginia mine where two men were injured last month in a flash fire.

Christmastime and the new year send television into overdrive with specials and holiday-themed episodes. What stands out? Here's a look at noteworthy programs and a countdown to the most special of all specials.

CINCINNATI — It spread like a cold virus through a day care center.

For more than a century, thousands of mentally disabled Americans were isolated from society, sometimes for life, by being confined to huge public hospitals.

Local Chinese officials on Wednesday denied allegations by a Belgian television crew that they had been attacked while trying to report on the HIV epidemic in a hard-hit rural village, state media said.

Extendicare, the large health-care chain that owns the Richmond nursing home where the staff was videotaped abusing and neglecting an 84-year-old Alzheimer's patient, has big plans to profit from the aging of the Baby Boomers.

Usually when a charity wants a donor to return, the agency is seeking another contribution. Helping Hands in Bentonville wants the person who left what's apparently a funerary urn to come back and get it.

In his first news conference since President-elect Barack Obama asked him to stay on, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that he and Obama agree on the U.S. course in Iraq, but he couldn't commit to Obama's pledge of a 16-month withdrawal. Instead, Gates said the pace of the drawdown would be one of several discussions in which he'll participate during the new administration.