Word: africa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...shape of the global gold-mining industry in the process. China's gold output has climbed nearly 50% over the past five years; the total surpassed 276 tons last year, enough to make China the world's largest producer of the precious metal, for the first time supplanting South Africa, which had been No. 1 since 1905. This isn't a fluke. China's surprisingly high reserves and growing domestic demand mean the country will likely remain the industry leader in coming years. Says Paul Atherley, managing director of Leyshon Resources, an Australian mining company: "China is going to become...
...decades. Personal ownership of gold was banned as a bourgeois extravagance, and production rarely broke 20 tons a year. That started to change with economic reform in the 1990s. Small wildcat operations began to proliferate, and these relatively unsophisticated outfits dominate the sector today. While countries such as South Africa, Australia, the U.S. and Canada get most of their production from a few dozen large, efficient mines, China has an estimated 2,000 mines scattered throughout the country. And because of their sketchy practices, the smaller operators are "a problem," says Zhang Yongtao, general secretary of the China Gold Association...
...Atherley, the Australian mining-company executive. "They get a good mine and they start acquiring. It is really down to corporate fate. That's the only thing stopping Chinese groups." Says Zhang of the China Gold Association: "We can keep this up for a long time." Having passed South Africa and with its best years ahead, "China won't have any problems remaining on top for the next 20 years." The country's miners may have reached the sun god's lair after...
...intervention "will have high diplomatic, human and financial cost implications for the AU, which it can ill afford. Besides, any sustained military intervention in the country will have to be followed by a robust reconstruction effort, which neither the AU nor the [Comoran] union government can afford." Elsewhere in Africa, AU operations are far more limited, deploying small, ineffective forces in Somalia and Darfur. While the AU did lead efforts to stem post-election violence in Kenya in January, it does little to quell unrest in other areas, such as Congo, Mali, Niger, Nigeria or Uganda, or looming confrontation between...
...ends up succeeding at none of its goals." Others contend that in cases of humanitarian crisis, the moral imperative to intervene remains, but acknowledge Darfur has exposed shameful limits to international will, and unity, in the service of those concerns. "It's incredibly depressing," says David Mozersky, Horn of Africa director for the International Crisis Group. "The international system has failed...