Energy, Mining & Utilities

Papua New Guinea, one of the world's largest islands, has fortunes in gold under its lush green mountains and a diversity of indigenous culture. The arrival of a Canadian mining company has brought violent clashes and transformed the indigenous lands forever. Listen to an interview with the author, David Martinez.  Read More

Extra monitoring is needed on BP PLC's (BP) Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, particularly on cracks and leakages in its coating, the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, or OPIC, said in a report. Read More

Farmers continue to protest against Reliance's power project in UP Read More

Enslaved workers make charcoal used to make basic steel ingredient Read More

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday ordered to the Atlantic Richfield Company, ARCO, to begin an investigation to determine the nature and extent of contamination at the Anaconda Copper Mine in Yerington, Nevada. Read More

Only days away from the end of the United Nations' Year of Deserts and Desertification, four experts discuss the challenges of translating a decade's worth of research about the degradation of land in arid areas of the world. Phuong Tran reports from VOA's Dakar bureau, located in the arid Saharan region of West Africa. Read More

ECUADOR: Ecuador's attorney general has asked U.S. officials to investigate Chevron Corp's alleged "fraud and deceit" connected with oil-field contamination in the Amazon rain forest, the latest salvo in a long-running legal dispute. Read More

A US court has almost halved the damages oil giant Exxon Mobil must pay for a 1989 oil spill off Alaska. Read More

In the woods at the fringe of this Western Maryland town, a mountain of waste 50 feet high is slouching into a creek that's tinted an eerie orange. The "gob pile" is refuse from a long-abandoned coal mine. And the stream into which it's eroding, Winebrenner Run, is devoid of life - one of the state's worst cases of sulfuric acid pollution from mines. Read More

While Iraq represents bloodshed and death on a massive scale to most people, to Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) it has brought a boom time, boosting the revenues of British-based PMSCs alone from £320 million in 2003 to more than £1.8 billion in 2004. In the same year income for the industry worldwide reached $100 billion. Read More