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FIFTY environmental activists have stormed and occupied an open cut goldmine in Western New South Wales, halting mining operations, and causing the arrest of eight protesters, police and the activists said today.

WHEN Marinduque Copper Mining Corp. (Marcopper) stopped its operation in 1997, the municipality of Santa Cruz in Marinduque came to a standstill. Almost 2,500 employees were left jobless, businesses suffered from low sales; some even had to close shop.

Two patents granted in the United States between 2000 and 2002 and another for which an application has been filed have put "maca", a high altitude Andean plant that is used by indigenous people in Peru, at the centre of a new battle against biopiracy, which involves the construction of an international network against the misappropriation of traditional knowledge.

Police and rock throwing demonstrators clashed during a protest against the American mining company, Freeport-McMoRan, today leaving three policemen and one Air Force officer dead in the remote province of Papua, witnesses and officials said.

Water rights groups say transnational corporations are increasingly sinking their teeth into Latin America's water services, but studies by the United Nations and other experts point to the contrary: these companies are backing off, and may not come back any time soon.

A mandatory program to control mercury emissions from Nevada gold mines was approved by state officials Wednesday over the objections of environmentalists and residents from the neighboring states of Utah and Idaho.

The mining industry has a worldwide image problem. In developing and developed countries alike, the public tends to regard mines as dirty, dangerous and disruptive - and those who stand to profit from them as greedy despoilers.

Larry Keuhn, the former head of British Columbia Teachers' Federation, looks at the reshaping of education to fit the needs of global corporations by critiquing a paper prepared by South Korea's Ministry of Labor and the economic integration of the Asia-Pacific region.

Tens of thousands of Mexican miners and metal workers joined a nationwide strike on Wednesday in two separate disputes that crippled output at the country's biggest mines, metals refineries and steel mills.

The EPA alleged Wednesday that Northshore, a subsidiary of Cleveland-Cliffs and its former owner, Cyprus Minerals, modified three taconite furnaces at its Silver Bay processing plant without installing the best available pollution control technology.

Newmont Mining agreed Thursday to pay $30 million to Indonesia in a settlement of a civil lawsuit in which the government argued that the company had polluted a bay with arsenic and mercury.

MORE WOES for Lafayette Philippines Inc. (LPI) whose mine on Rapu-Rapu Island in Albay province figured in two toxic spills last year.

The cyanide "leakage" that killed tons of fish in the Czech river Labe (Elbe) recently has re-focused public attention throughout central and Eastern Europe to the environmental and human dangers associated with this toxic chemical, especially when it spills into a nearby river or tributary.

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