In Las Vegas: Hibbing on a Hot Streak

In the waiting room of the airport in Hibbing, Minn., Jim Shaw drops a quarter into a newspaper machine and gets back 30 cents. "I'm on a roll," he declares, and begins planning how to parlay his luck into a gambling empire over the next four days.

Never mind that he gets no newspaper. It would tell him only what he already knows: slow times in the iron-mining business have pushed local unemployment up to around 15%, and a factory owner who is pulling out says Hibbing has gone Communist, by which he means that real estate taxes are too high....

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