The price of gold

A computer tour using Google Earth to swoop down over the rain forests and glacier-capped mountains of the remote Indonesian province of Papua, or the operations of Freeport-McMoRan, where the American company mines the largest gold reserve in the world, reveals "the deepening spiral that Freeport-McMoRan has bored out of its Grasberg Mine as it pursues a virtually bottomless store of gold hidden inside. The images also show a spreading soot-colored bruise of almost a billion tons of mine waste that the company, based in New Orleans, has dumped directly into a jungle river of what had been one of the last untouched landscapes in the world. What is far harder to discern is the intricate web of political and military ties" and questionable human rights and environmental records over the years to sustain this greed for gold..

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Also read: River of waste and Behind gold's glitter