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BY JAMES TARANTO Friday, April 30, 2004 4:11 p.m. EDT Joe Says It Was So Remember Joe Wilson, the loudmouthed former ambassador who stirred up a kerfuffle last year by claiming that BUSH LIED!!!! when he purportedly said Saddam Hussein's Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Niger? Now Wilson has a book out, and it seems he's changing his story. The Washington Post reports: It was Saddam Hussein's information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, often referred to in the Western press as "Baghdad Bob," who approached an official of the African nation of Niger in 1999 to discuss trade--an overture...

Down, down, down. In three minutes, the skip drops nearly 1,700 feet below Cleveland. Then the giant metal door swings open, and you’re deposited in an other-world, with walls, ceiling and floor made of salt. Dirty brown salt at the Cargill mine’s entrance, where the rock has absorbed diesel fumes and dust for more than 60 years. Pristine white, with glimmering flecks, at the mine’s far reaches, 3 miles north, under Lake Erie. “I look out at the water, and it’s like, man, we’re under that!” said Cargill employee Cachet Hilton, 45. Every day, the 5-mile wide mine gets a...

Two employees are still unaccounted for at the Cargill Salt Mine at Avery Island after a roof collapse in the mine early Monday morning. The facility has been shut down while rescue operations and an investigation into the incident are underway. According to a statement from the company, local rescue workers and members of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration are on site. There were 18 employees on shift at the time of the collapse. The other 16 employees have been evacuated without any reported injuries.

[M]icrobes are currently used on Earth to extract materials of value from rock. Human miners crush the rocks and add liquid — usually water — to activate microbes dormant in the ore. The microbes then use chemical processes to break down rocks — essentially digesting them — to access nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen. Valuable metals and minerals can be a bacterial waste product. On Earth, mining companies use bacteria to extract about 20 per cent of the world's copper and five per cent of our planet's gold. Mining experiment aboard the ISS. The basalt rock they used in the...

MP Materials, which operates the largest rare earth element mines in the Western Hemisphere, had a big week. It was one of three companies on Nov. 17 to receive Defense Department grants intended to return rare earth production to the United States. The following day it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The Pentagon awarded a Defense Production Act Title III grant worth $9.6 million to MP Materials so it can begin to refine the strategic minerals at its Mountain Pass, California, mine. “This grant from the DoD is outstanding. It's humbling. And we're very proud of the...

One thing we learned from the debate in Cleveland last Tuesday, when Trump wasn't interrupting, is that Joe Biden makes up numbers on the fly. There was a lot of fibbing going on. Consider this exchange between the two candidates: BIDEN: We handed (Trump) a booming economy. He blew it. He blew it. TRUMP: It wasn't booming. WALLACE: Sir, wait. Is it fair to say he blew it when ... there was record low unemployment before COVID? BIDEN: Yeah. Yeah, because what he did, even before COVID, manufacturing went in the hole. Manufacturing went in the hole. He went on...

(ATF) China has responded angrily to a US executive order to look into the country's dependence on rare earths from China. Reuters reported the order announced Wednesday could lead to tariffs, quotas or other possible import restrictions, according to the executive order released on Wednesday. In China the news was met with irritation. Tencent news, for instance, said the US had “entered a state of national emergency”. China does lead exports and has the top position in production of the group of elements that are is a vital material for the manufacture of technology products from mobile phones to military...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered his Cabinet secretaries to look into the country’s reliance on rare earths in his latest bid to end China’s dominance of the industry. The move could lead to tariffs, quotas or other possible import restrictions, according to an executive order released on Wednesday.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released its final environmental impact statement on Friday which found gold and copper mining in Alaska “would not be expected to have a measurable effect on fish numbers.” That clears the final hurdle for the Corps to issue a permit this year to Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., the Canadian company that has proposed the mining operation in the state. Environmentalists oppose the project and the Obama administration did what it could to keep the Alaskan wilderness off limits to energy production. “In a scientific review conducted under the Obama administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection...

<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Wide swaths of the Interior Department were taken off the Internet again Tuesday after a federal judge concluded that the agency still has not fixed security holes that threaten payments owed to American Indians.</p> <p>It was the third such shutdown for the Interior Department since 2001, when an investigator found that hackers could easily steal money from a system that allocates energy and mineral royalties to 300,000 Indians for use of their land.</p>

NASA’s top executive concentrating on human spaceflight, Doug Loverro, has resigned just a week before the scheduled start of a milestone space mission. Loverro became NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations last December, and was playing a leading role in NASA’s Artemis moon program as well as preparations for next week’s launch of a SpaceX Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station. That mission, set for liftoff on May 27 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is due to send NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the station for a stay that could last...

Posted on May 4, 2020May 4, 2020 by Matt Williams Want to Mine the Moon? Here’s a Detailed Map of all its Minerals The prospect of mining asteroids and the Moon is on a lot of peoples’ minds lately. Maybe it’s all the growth that’s happened in the commercial aerospace industry in the past few decades. Or perhaps it’s because of Trump’s recent executive order to allow for asteroid and lunar mining. Either way, there is no shortage of entrepreneurs and futurists who can’t wait to start prospecting and harvest the natural bounty of space!Coincidentally enough, future lunar miners...

A simple visit to an obscure factory by Chinese President Xi on Monday is all it took to raise the specter that China could be contemplating cutting off supply of critical materials to the U.S. and potentially crippling large swathes of its industries. Also, fueled by political innuendo in Xi’s recent call for a new “Long March” in reference to a key founding tenet of the Chinese Communist Party, speculators are growing increasingly wary of Chinese export restrictions to the U.S., including rare earth minerals. As the world’s largest producer, the Middle Kingdom has a vice-like grip on rare earths...

FTC WARNED INVESTORS OFF HUGE DOLLAR GAINS/TAKE 3Jan 27, 2005 - FreeMarketNews.comby Chris MackWashington’s regulators are supposed to stand up for the little guy. Maybe they also help the little guy stay that way. In the last decade, under the pretense of protecting people from losing their shirts, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released warnings about indium and other strategic metal investing “scams.” Some of these warnings haven’t been updated since - and in any event they are all over the ‘Net. Anyone with a computer and Google can type in “fraud” and “indium” and come up with the following:...

MP Materials, which runs the sole operating rare earths mine in the United States, is an unusual victim in the year-long tit-for-tat trade war between the two largest economies on the planet, as the conflict looks set to open up a new battlefront over technology. The operator of the Mountain Pass mine in California said it will kick-start its own processing operation by the end of 2020, after China last week more than doubled an import duty on concentrates to 25 per cent effective June 1. MP exports pellets – ground-up ores that contain oxides of rare earth elements –...

COVID-19: It’s all we talk about, on the cable news, and in our 6-foot socially-distanced prison walks around our silent neighborhoods. And in nearly every conversation comes the intellectual shrug, “who could have seen this coming?” A single phrase that neatly absolves governments and experts alike of any responsibility of predicting the pandemic and, if not being able to stop it, at least cushioning its blow........ But is it unfair to engage in so much 20-20 hindsight? After all, who could see COVID coming? Well, we did. We — as in nodes within the U.S. Government tasked with tracking critical...

Four years ago, one of China’s largest agricultural importers sent representatives to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., hoping that meetings with elite party officials might yield business opportunities. The company, the Dandong Port Group, was particularly focused on the governors in attendance, according to an interview with Dandong’s general counsel broadcast by Chinese state television. But now, the company’s widening influence is coming under scrutiny by federal prosecutors, who are examining the relationship between Dandong’s wealthy and connected chairman, Wang Wenliang, and Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, a Democrat who was elected in 2013. A federal law enforcement...

The Chosen one, Hunter Biden’s Chinese Money connected to African “Blood mines.” A private equity firm bankrolled by the Chinese government that is tied to Hunter Biden, invested in an alleged African “blood mine.”

President Donald Trump signed an executive order today (April 6) establishing U.S. policy on the exploitation of off-Earth resources. That policy stresses that the current regulatory regime — notably, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty — allows the use of such resources. This view has long held sway in U.S. government circles. For example, the United States, like the other major spacefaring nations, has not signed the 1979 Moon Treaty, which stipulates that non-scientific use of space resources be governed by an international regulatory framework. And in 2015, Congress passed a law explicitly allowing American companies and citizens to use moon...

Australia’s conservative coalition government will put jobs and the economy ahead of any U.N. demands for it to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann said Sunday. Cormann said Australia’s government will work to set new long-term plans addressing greenhouse gas emissions ahead of yet another global climate summit in Glasgow year, however it won’t pursue any net-zero emissions policies that hurt workers in key economic areas.