Mining

Fear of a shortage of rare-earth metals used in high-tech military and industrial products has spawned global efforts to reopen abandoned mines, including the formidable Mountain Pass Mine in California's Mojave Desert. Discovered in the 1940s by uranium prospectors, Mountain Pass contains an array of rare earths, including cerium and lanthanum, in concentrations almost double those found at the world's biggest rare-earth mine, China's Bayan Obo. "You're looking at the greatest rare-earth deposit in the world," says operations manager John Benfield as he ushers a visitor around the 2,200-acre site 60 miles southwest of Las Vegas.

"Tonight You're Mine," set at (and filmed during) Scotland's largest outdoor rock festival, T in the Park, is a "Once"-like attempt at mixing simple romance, off-the-cuff charm and music. When preening American frontman Adam (Luke Treadaway), one-half of a hipster electronic duo, is accidentally handcuffed to Morello, the cheeky lead singer of a punk-lite all-girl band (a frisky, appealing Natalia Tena), it's not hard to figure out what the refrain of this meet-cute two-hander is going to sound like.

Golden State politics provide cartoonists with golden opportunities. According to Rex Babin, ex-Governor Moonbean's excoriation of an ex-president's extracurricular exploits excited Meg Whitman, the ex-EBay exec. The San Bruno gas-line explosion blasted a statewide wakeup call, which Tom Meyer put in his pipe and smoked. And for escapists looking to avoid depressing news, there's always Fantasyland, if you can get by Steve Breen's eighth dwarf. Of course, the Magic Kingdom will gladly accept your gold card.

A group of 21st-century private space entrepreneurs is expected to unveil an ambitious new venture to mine the surface of near-Earth asteroids in search of precious metals and rare metallic elements. The plan may seem like it was torn from a science fiction novel, and critics say the idea may be far-fetched and difficult for a small company to accomplish. But the company, Planetary Resources Inc., has already drawn an A-list of investors and advisors. The backers include Google Inc. Chief Executive Larry Page and Chairman Eric Schmidt, "Avatar" director James Cameron and Microsoft Corp.'s former chief software architect Charles Simonyi.

The mountains that rise above their Duarte home have served as both backdrop and recurring character in the lives of John and Martha Jansen. On clear nights, John takes to the ridges with his telescope and amateur astronomy guides. Martha finds quiet inspiration for her oil paintings in the panoramic view of the peaks. In summers past, the couple often took their six children on treks in search of the famed 80-foot, three-tiered waterfalls hidden in the mountains' ravines. A few years ago, one of their sons hiked up a trail with his girlfriend to show her the "marry me" poster atop his parents' roof.

In the first GOP debate featuring Newt Gingrich as the undisputed front-runner, rival Mitt Romney threw the first jab at the former House speaker, attempting to cast him as a career politician. Asked where he and Gingrich differed, Romney said, ”We could start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon. I'm not in favor of spending that kind of money to do that.” He said he also disagrees with Gingrich's proposal to eliminate child labor laws so that poor kids can work to clean their schools.

Google Inc. Chief Executive Larry Page and Chairman Eric Schmidt are two of the high-profile backers of Planetary Resources Inc., a newly formed company that plans to spend millions of dollars on the distinctly sci-fi goal of mining the surface of near-Earth asteroids for precious metals and rare metallic elements. As projects go, this one is definitely ambitious and insane sounding. The plan involves sending "a swarm" of 20-pound satellites that cost as much as $5 million apiece 500 miles from Earth in search of potential platinum-rich asteroids, The Times reported . If an asteroid appears to be worth mining, the company will send in a fleet of even higher-powered satellites for a closer look, and if it still appears to be worth mining, they'll send in the drilling robots.

Mining giant BHP Billiton went on the attack Wednesday, saying it would take its nearly $39-billion takeover bid for Potash Corp. straight to shareholders after the fertilizer firm's board spurned the offer as grossly inadequate. The Anglo-Australian mining firm expressed confidence in its $130-a-share all-cash offer for Canada-based Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. The offer values the company at $38.6 billion and represents a 20% premium to the closing price of Potash shares Aug. 11, the day before BHP Billiton's first approach to the firm.

Hey, did you hear the joke about the Great Recession of 2008-10? You'll be laughing all the way to the poorhouse, or the federal penitentiary in Bernie Madoff's case. ( Bah-DUM-bum? ) Oh, we've got a billion of 'em, folks. Make that 700 billion if you're a banker with powerful friends in Washington. For instance, take Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers -- please. For the tens of millions of Americans who've lost their jobs, homes and dreams in the current economic downturn and the millions more who've witnessed the disaster with mounting anxiety and fury, there's nothing very funny about the financial crash of 2008 and its roiling aftermath.

The giant Rio Tinto Borax mine in Boron locked out about 540 hourly workers Sunday after the employee union refused to ratify a new labor contract. The lockout began at 7 a.m. as miners showed up outside the gates and were told they couldn't come in. Replacements were brought in to do their jobs. "It's obviously a drastic measure and I am well aware of the fact that this has very real consequences to our employees. It's not a bully tactic, but it's our only real alternative," said Dean Gehring, general manager of the mine.

Google Inc. Chief Executive Larry Page and Chairman Eric Schmidt are two of the high-profile backers of Planetary Resources Inc., a newly formed company that plans to spend millions of dollars on the distinctly sci-fi goal of mining the surface of near-Earth asteroids for precious metals and rare metallic elements. As projects go, this one is definitely ambitious and insane sounding. The plan involves sending "a swarm" of 20-pound satellites that cost as much as $5 million apiece 500 miles from Earth in search of potential platinum-rich asteroids, The Times reported . If an asteroid appears to be worth mining, the company will send in a fleet of even higher-powered satellites for a closer look, and if it still appears to be worth mining, they'll send in the drilling robots.

A new private space company is expected to be unveiled Tuesday at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. Planetary Resources Inc. is a Seattle company that intends to mine near-Earth asteroids for raw materials ranging from water to precious metals. “There are precious metals in near-infinite quantities in space. When the availability of these metals increase, the cost will reduce on everything including defibrillators, hand-held devices, TV and computer monitors, catalysts; and with the abundance of these metals we'll be able to use them in mass production,” Peter H. Diamandis, co-founder and co-chairman, said in a statement.

David Treuer never planned on writing nonfiction. "I was happy working on my novels," the fiction writer and USC professor says over the phone from Ann Arbor, where he is visiting the University of Michigan to talk about his new book, "Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life" (Grove: 330 pp., $26). "But after the Red Lake shooting in 2005" - in which a 16-year-old named Jeffrey James Weise went on a shooting spree at a school on Minnesota's Red Lake Reservation - "I became upset and frustrated with the coverage.

When it comes to weight control, exercise doesn't matter. Non-exercise is what counts. That may sound like heresy, but, in fact, it's a theory based on years of highly respected research - and the science behind a little high-tech gizmo called the Gruve Solution. The Gruve is one of a gaggle of gadgets called personal activity monitors that you can carry in your pocket, hang on a keychain, wear like a watch. In this case, you "get your Gruve on" - as its maker, Gruve Technologies, likes to say - by attaching it to your waistband.

There's still gold in them thar rivers, and adventurers still cherish dreams of wealth. These days, though, sifting for gold is more a form of recreation than a business, and the tin pans have mostly been replaced by motorized machines called suction dredges. And the competing claims aren't over who has prospecting rights, but whether this form of mechanized gold hunting is causing irreparable harm to rivers in Northern California and the fish that swim in them. In 2011, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation that imposed a moratorium on the practice until 2016, by which time the state Department of Fish and Game was to adopt regulations that eliminated the potential for significant environmental damage and that set permit fees high enough to cover the state's costs.

A former mine official has pleaded guilty to conspiring to impede mine safety enforcement at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, where 29 workers died in a 2010 explosion. Gary May, 43, of Bloomingrose, W. Va., admitted Thursday to concealing health and safety violations, using code phrases to give advance warning of inspections and ordering a mine examination book to be falsified. His actions, while he was superintendent of the mine, were intended to mask safety violations, including poor airflow and accumulation of explosive coal dust, two factors that have been deemed causes of the deadly explosion.

Gerry Wolfe, the Canadian-born president of a Chinese mining company, has a pretty good explanation for why Beijing isn't hunkering down like everyone else during the global financial crisis: "The Chinese have more cash than anyone else right now." That's one reason Chinalco Mining Peru, a unit of China's state-owned Chinalco, is continuing with a project announced two years ago to open a $2-billion copper mine in the Peruvian Andes by 2012, Wolfe said in an interview in this capital Friday.

On your article about mining in Big Sur (Nov. 29), I disagree with Steven Woolpert. I don't think that his company should be permitted to mine part of a national park. Why give up a scenic view for a sidewalk. PAUL LIU Los Angeles

The federal agency charged with ensuring mine safety failed to enforce laws that might have prevented the Upper Big Branch mine explosion that killed 29 coal miners and seriously injured two others, according to an independent assessment of the 2010 incident. If the Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration had enforced existing safety laws in a timely manner, “it would have lessened the chances of - and possibly could have prevented - the explosion,” a four-person panel of mine safety experts concluded.

"South Park," a cartoon that is and isn't about four little boys in a Rocky Mountain hamlet, begins its 16th season Wednesday on Comedy Central. Sixteen years of "South Park - it began so long ago that Patrick Duffy was the subject of a joke in its second episode - sounds even more amazing than 23 years of "The Simpsons," given the younger show's habitual profanity, vulgarity and violence. But that is also obviously part of its appeal and, indeed, often its very point. What's kept both these small-town allegorical comedies valuable and viable over their long runs are qualities they share: a disregard for empty authority, skepticism regarding beliefs not based in fact, an impatience with hypocrisy and cant, and the happy realization that the worst aspects of humans both as individuals and (especially)