Mining

A 16-year-old U.S. tourist fell 1,000 feet to his death at an abandoned mine in central Mexico, and rescue workers were trying to recover his body. Witnesses told police that Taylor Crane of Pennsylvania tried to jump over the 10-foot-wide shaft of the Cinco Senores mine in San Luis de la Paz in Guanajuato state and fell in.

The government said it had lifted a six-year moratorium on the diamond trade put in place after former President Charles Taylor was accused of using "blood diamonds" to fuel civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone. "People can start applying for mining, selling and broker licenses" for diamonds on Monday, a government official said. The United Nations imposed sanctions on Liberia's diamonds in May 2001 and the Liberian government complied by placing a moratorium on all mining. The U.N.

Fly overhead in a bush plane -- there are no roads between native villages -- and marvel: Eight giant rivers braid across hundreds of miles of wetlands, carving cobalt ribbons through snow-coned mountains before emptying into Bristol Bay. For more than a century, the wealth of this southwest Alaska watershed has sprung from the astonishing volume of salmon nurtured by those wild rivers.

Hutchinson, Kan. The nation's longest grain elevator -- nearly half a mile long -- loomed nearby as I pulled into the parking lot of the new Kansas Underground Salt Museum. Elevators had been on my mind lately, but not the kind that held grain. To reach the underground museum -- located 650 feet below the surface in salt deposits formed millions of years ago -- I had to ride an elevator that descended 65 stories into the earth.

More than 21,300 mining claims have been staked within 10 miles of California's national parks and monuments and federal wilderness and roadless areas, according to an analysis of U.S. Bureau of Land Management records released Monday. The claims, which have risen by more than one-third in the last four years, include more than 2,170 staked outside Death Valley National Park, 525 near Joshua Tree National Park and 285 outside Yosemite National Park.

When a law was passed in 1872 to let miners extract minerals virtually for free from federal lands, it was meant to promote settlement of the West. With that goal long since accomplished, the House voted 244-166 on Thursday to overhaul the 135-year-old law, adding protections for the environment and, for the first time, requiring miners to pay royalties for the gold, silver, copper, uranium and other minerals they extract from public lands.

South Africa's gold companies, already mining at the world's deepest depths, are looking to plumb even deeper veins in a new gold rush spurred by record prices. The deeper miners go, the richer the ore being uncovered. The price in dangers, though, includes rockfalls, poisonous gas explosions, flooding and earthquakes. That has stirred up concerns about the safety of miners, who experts say have the worst lot among South Africa's industrial workers.

Thobela Booi arrived in this mining town with hopes of landing a job that would enable him to support his wife and child. He ended up 5,000 feet underground, killed by the fumes of a raging fire. Booi, 30, had been one of hundreds of desperate laborers who risk their lives working in the shadows of legal mining operations, sneaking in through abandoned or poorly secured shafts and making their way through a warren of interconnecting tunnels to the ore.

Squatting along the rocky banks of the Nmai Hka River, villagers labor from dawn till dusk over large wooden pans, scrounging for crumbs from the junta's table. Children barely big enough to swirl the heavy slurry toil alongside men and women, doing backbreaking work that exposes them to toxic mercury.

Rick Price left the mines more than 20 years ago to pursue his call to the ministry. He's a pastor now in a little church in the mountains -- and he longs to go back underground. There's something about mining that tugs at him. It's filthy, loud, exhausting work, and it's dangerous. Some coal seams are so shallow that miners spend their shift on hands and knees.