"Nautilus Minerals of Australia has a license from Papua New Guinea to mine a site the size of 21 football fields for its rich deposits. The minerals are found there in very high concentrations, because a natural hot spring on the seafloor has been laying them down for thousands of years."

"North Dakota farmer Justin Zahradka will plant wheat this spring on 40 acres that has been off-limits for two decades, protected by a government conservation program that is shrinking as high crop prices make farmland more valuable."

"Tia Jackson’s family has lived on the same block of Halsey Street in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood for five generations. Kristen Rapp is a newcomer. Jackson is black. Rapp is white. In a part of town where the gentrification process has been grinding along painfully for years, the two might never have met if not for a sign on a fence on a vacant lot, left there by the members of a group called 596 Acres."

"SAN FRANCISCO -- A plan to dig a vast copper mine in arid southern Arizona is pitting the needs of American industry -- and arguably the national economy -- against a coalition of local residents and environmentalists."

"CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- A federal judge has overturned the Obama administration's veto of the largest mountaintop-removal mining permit in West Virginia history, saying the agency greatly oversteps its authority in blocking the controversial project."

"The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Wednesday that an Idaho couple had the right to file an immediate court challenge to a federal Environmental Protection Agency decision designating their property as wetlands and forbidding them from building a home there."

"An iPhone can do a lot of things. But can it arm Congolese rebels?

That is the question being debated by a battalion of lobbyists from electronics makers, mining companies and international aid organizations that has descended on the Securities and Exchange Commission in recent months seeking to influence the drafting of a Dodd-Frank regulation that has nothing to do with the financial crisis."

"An energy company with oil and gas leases across much of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation’s western edge has suspended plans to drill a well near a culturally sacred ridge, halting the operation after tribal members voiced concern that it would spiritually denude the site."

"The Senate approved a highway bill Wednesday that includes a long-sought provision for the Gulf Coast: A guarantee that 80 percent of the fines collected from the April 2010 BP oil spill — an amount that could reach $20 billion — would be distributed for coastal restoration to the five states along the Gulf of Mexico: Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Texas and Alabama."