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Though largely unexplored, mining experts think the Indian Ocean island has big untapped deposits of gold, platinum, sapphires, rubies, diamonds and emeralds. Each year, thousands leave their villages to dig for gold and precious stones in a country where three quarters of the 17 million-strong population live on less than a dollar a day. An increasing number of international mineral exploration companies are also setting up operations on the world's fourth largest island.
The nation's coal mines have been required to pay only a fraction of the federal fines imposed after deadly accidents since 1999, a USA TODAY analysis shows.
It is the people of Appalachia who pay the highest price for the rest of the country's cheap energy-through contaminated water, flooding, cracked foundations and wells, bronchial problems related to breathing coal dust, and roads that have been torn up and turned deadly by speeding coal trucks.
In the largest U.S. anti-war protest in recent memory, at least 75,000 demonstrators encircled the White House on Saturday to demand a diplomatic solution to escalating tensions with Iraq.
With the same logic that dictates that logging is good for trees, the 5 years of the Bush Administration has rolled back regulations on mine safety at the bidding of mining corporations.
The head of the Mining Healthy and Safety Administration is himself a former mining executive. A New York Times article in August 2004 noted:
Bush administration policies have abandoned a series of Clinton-era safety proposals favored by coal miners while embracing others favored by mine owners.
Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian who grew up in childhood poverty, has won the Bolivian presidential elections. He is part of a wave of leftists taking power in Latin America and challenging multinational corporations.
Water that is undrinkable. Air that is better left unbreathed. A community impoverished, living above mountains of gold. These are some of the contradictions of Andalgalá, a town of 17,000 inhabitants in Catamarca, Argentina, 240 kilometres from the provincial capital, home for ten years now to the largest gold and copper mine in the country, and one of the largest in the world.
These days, instead of evoking Maine's tranquil forestland and waterways, the Poland Springs brand symbolizes a battle over who owns and controls the water that seeps into the state's permeable rock.
CorpWatch Director Joshua Karliner looks at the challenges facing the anti-corporate globalization movement since the WTC attack.
Five years after the citizens of Cochabamba won the "water war" against multinational Bechtel, the poorer half of the city still has no reliable access to the now-public water utility.
A number of South African mining companies, long a pillar of the country's economy, are now primed for take-off to countries with lower mining standards and labour regulations.
Jewellers throw weight behind mining bill protest US gold retailers fear proposed reform of an 1872 law could prompt an environmentalist backlash against them.
Firestone, a multinational rubber manufacturing giant known for its automobile tires, has come under fire from human rights and environmental groups for its alleged use of child labor and slave-like working conditions at a plantation in Liberia.
Vedanta, a fast growing British mining and aluminium production company founded by a billionaire expatriate Bombay businessman, threatens communities in India with environmental degradation and widespread pollution.