Free Republic

<p>MERERANI, Tanzania -- In the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, miners with flashlights tied to their heads crawl hundreds of feet beneath the East African plain, searching for a purple-brown crystal that will turn into a blue gem called tanzanite.</p> <p>Many of the rare stones chipped off by the spacemen, as the miners are called, find their way to display cases at Zales, QVC or Tiffany. But it's a long way from these dusty plains to U.S. jewelry stores, and the stones pass through many hands on their journey. Some of those hands, it is increasingly clear, belong to active supporters of Osama bin Laden.</p>

While human slavery is a fact of life in African nations like Mauritania and Sudan, Tanzania now is emerging as the latest center for the exploitation of child labor. Today, young children are forced to work in the country's mine, harvesting the valuable mineral resources of tanzanite, coltan and diamonds. Tanzanite, a semi-precious, purple-blue gemstone unique to Tanzania, was discovered for the first time 24 years ago by the Masai tribe. Its uniqueness and stunning beauty make it as sought-after and as valuable as diamonds. The resulting tanzanite mining rush lured thousands of Tanzanians and refugees from neighboring Congo, ...

African Ice Core Analysis Reveals Catastrophic Droughts, Shrinking Ice Fields, Civilization Shifts COLUMBUS, Ohio – A detailed analysis of six cores retrieved from the rapidly shrinking ice fields atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro shows that those tropical glaciers began to form about 11,700 years ago. The cores also yielded remarkable evidence of three catastrophic droughts that plagued the tropics 8,300, 5,200 and 4,000 years ago. Lastly, the analysis also supports Ohio State University researchers' prediction that these unique bodies of ice will disappear in the next two decades, the victims of global warming. These findings were published today in the journal...

<p>The snows of Kilimanjaro may soon be gone. The African mountain's white peak — made famous by writer Ernest Hemingway — is rapidly melting, researchers report.</p> <p>Some 85 percent of the ice that made up the mountaintop glaciers in 1912 was gone by 2007, researchers led by paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.</p>