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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.

The price of gold is higher than it has been in 17 years - pushing $500 an ounce. But much of the gold left to be mined is microscopic and is being wrung from the earth at enormous environmental cost, often in some of the poorest corners of the world.

Large-scale mining development and militarization in the Cordillera is condemned by the region's indigenous peoples.

This past Christmas, while children around the world wrote letters to Santa Claus whom they believed would deliver presents to them in a sleigh drawn by the mythical Rudolph, the actual human companions of the Arctic reindeer spent their holidays worrying about Beowulf, a British mining company.