Free Republic

See video at link. Mauritania is the latest country in the Sahara where gold has been found. Thousands are hoping to strike it rich – but digging for gold is dangerous and impacts upon human health and the environment. This is because to find gold, you need to dig extremely deep holes in the ground; and to extract the precious metal, you need toxic mercury. But that doesn’t put the gold diggers off at all. They compete for the best mining sites and within a short space of time, an entire settlement has sprung up on the desert sands. Michele...

JAKARTA, Indonesia - The closest most people will ever get to remote Papua, or the operations of Freeport-McMoRan, is a computer tour using Google Earth to swoop down over the rain forests and glacier-capped mountains where the American company mines the world's largest gold reserve. With a few taps on a keyboard, satellite images quickly reveal the deepening spiral that Freeport has bored out of its Grasberg mine as it pursues a virtually bottomless store of gold hidden inside. They also show a spreading soot-colored bruise of almost a billion tons of mine waste that the New Orleans-based company has...

BY JAMES TARANTO Friday, April 30, 2004 4:11 p.m. EDT Joe Says It Was So Remember Joe Wilson, the loudmouthed former ambassador who stirred up a kerfuffle last year by claiming that BUSH LIED!!!! when he purportedly said Saddam Hussein's Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Niger? Now Wilson has a book out, and it seems he's changing his story. The Washington Post reports: It was Saddam Hussein's information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, often referred to in the Western press as "Baghdad Bob," who approached an official of the African nation of Niger in 1999 to discuss trade--an overture...

[A] storm caused a power cut and blocked their way out. Without electricity, the lifts could not bring night shift workers to the surface, but they "appear to be fine", a spokesman for their employer said. He said about 65 miners have so far been rescued and all are accounted for. South Africa is a leading gold producer, but the industry has often been accused of a poor safety record. The Beatrix mine is in Welkom town, about 290km (180 miles) south-west of Johannesburg. It is owned by Sibanye-Stillwater mining firm. It has 23 levels, going down to 1,000 metres...

Land rights group vows to continue fight against 'rogue' state California gold miners are reeling from a Supreme Court of the United States refusal to hear a high-profile case concerning a statewide suction dredge mining ban. The top court denied gold miner Brandon Rinehart’s petition for his day in court Jan. 8.

Sitting in a courtroom three years ago, after skipping out on a sizable legal bill, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s youngest brother struck a reassuring tone: Don’t worry, the money is coming. “I deal through the Clinton Foundation,” Tony Rodham said, according to court transcripts uncovered by the New York Times. He gave his word that Hillary and Bill were setting him up with Haitian-government permits to build a $22 million housing development in the earthquake-stricken country. “I hound my brother-in-law, because it’s his fund that we’re going to get our money from,” Rodham explained, promising a $1 million check once the...

The presidential ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton have become ensnared in an obscure gold-mining project in Haiti, as the Democratic favorite for the presidency begins her second run for the White House. In a story that suggests cronyism, questionable ethics and a blurring of the lines between charity and profiteering, The Daily Mail reported on Sunday that Hillary Clinton's brother, Tony Rodham, sat on the board of VCS Mining when the unlisted, Delaware-based junior was granted a permit to mine gold in Haiti following a massive earthquake on the impoverished island nation in 2010. The permit was the first to...

Poachers kill 300 Zimbabwe elephants with cyanide • Cyanide has been used to kill 300 elephants in Zimbabwe's biggest nature reserve - three times the original estimate - as new photos show the scale of the slaughter Poachers in Zimbabwe have killed more than 300 elephants and countless other safari animals by cyanide poisoning, The Telegraph has learned. The full extent of the devastation wreaked in Hwange, the country's largest national park, has been revealed by legitimate hunters who discovered what conservationists say is the worst single massacre in southern Africa for 25 years. Pictures taken by the hunters, which...

Sasquatch cited in mine hearings Most people consider the sasquatch a legendary creature, but the mythical bush man of northern B.C. received its fair share of attention at environmental review hearings into the proposed New Prosperity gold and copper mine. While most of the attention focused on more tangible creatures like trout, salmon and grizzly bears, members of First Nations community have repeatedly brought up the sasquatch during community hearings over the past three weeks. In most cases, the aboriginal speakers talked about the ape-like man in the context of legend, but others treated sasquatches as something the Canadian Environmental...

An Alaskan mine that may contain more than $500 billion in gold, copper and other minerals will never get dug if environmentalists get their way. The proposed Pebble Mine, near the headwaters of Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska, could yield a staggering 107 million ounces of gold, 80 billion pounds of copper and 5.6 billion pounds of molybdenum, which is used to make steel alloys. Pebble Partnership, which wants to do the digging, is so confident of the bounty beneath the ground it has spent five years and $107 million monitoring the soil, water and air in order to assure...

“We are cursed because of our gold. All we do is suffer. There is no benefit to us.” – Congolese gold miner The northeast corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is home to one of Africa’s richest goldfields. Competition to control the gold mines and trading routes has spurred the bloody conflict that has gripped this area since the start of the Congolese war in 1998 and continues to the present. Soldiers and armed group leaders, seeing control of the gold mines as a way to money, guns, and power, have fought each other ruthlessly, often targeting civilians...

Canadian mining company says California limits make its Imperial property worthless. Mining company Glamis Gold Ltd. is taking aim at tough California environmental laws by threatening to sue under an obscure provision of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Glamis says new California restrictions on open-pit mining have destroyed the value of its proposed gold mine in Imperial County. To build the mine, which has long been controversial, Glamis would excavate 1,571 square miles of federally protected desert in the state's southeast corner that includes religious and cultural sites sacred to the Quechan Indians.