Word: lands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Huston's benevolent gesture was a sentiment decades ahead of its time. Today, gold and other precious-metal mining companies are extracting bounties of ore, leaving behind scarred mountainsides, toxic acid-rock runoffs and waste-rock dumps - and although much of the damage is on public land, the mining operations, most of which are multinationals, are not required to pay royalties on precious-metals production, and many escape liability for environmental restoration...
...which could force the mines to pay up. For 135 years, the mines have taken wealth out of the public domain under the protection of the General Mining Law - a let-'er-rip relic of the wild frontier past that allows mines to stake claims on almost any federal land. Since the law's enactment in 1872, the U.S. government has given away more than $245 billion in mineral reserves through patenting or royalty-free mining, says Rep. Nick Rahall, the West Virginia Democrat who is behind the new bill. Compare that, he says, to the $35 billion the Treasury...
...those collections would go toward remediation of the $32 billion in environmental mining damage already incurred in the U.S., and one-third to help local communities adversely affected by mining operations. "We're trying to put some fair return to the American taxpayer for the use of their land," says Rahall, the new chairman of the House Interior Subcommittee. "Whether it's coal or gold mining, there are social and economic impacts that are just the same, which is why we ought to be treating all these extractive industries the same...
...original version of this story incorrectly implied that Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention was at the Values Voters Summit on the morning of Mike Huckabee's speech. Dr. Land spoke at the Summit the day before and left that night...
...incursion is potentially treacherous and could lead Turkey into a quagmire much like the U.S. is facing in the rest of Iraq. The PKK's Kandil Mountain stronghold is notoriously rugged terrain well suited to guerrilla warfare. Air strikes alone are unlikely to be effective against it. A major land offensive, depending on how deep Turkish troops venture and in what numbers, could lead beyond fighting the PKK, to clashes between Turkish troops and Iraqi Kurdish soldiers, as well as civilian casualties...