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Mali hearing on Barrick's suspended Loulo-Gounkoto complex adjourned to June 12

Mali hearing on Barrick's suspended Loulo-Gounkoto complex adjourned to June 12

TimesLIVEa day ago

A Malian court has adjourned until June 12 a hearing on whether to put the Loulo-Gounkoto gold mining complex, suspended since January due to a dispute between its owner Barrick Mining and Mali's government, under provisional administration, a judge said on Thursday.
The government's request to appoint an administrator comes amid soaring gold prices, and signals its desire to end the standoff and reopen the complex.
Granting the request would represent a major escalation of a years-long dispute over taxes and ownership between the West African country and the Canadian miner, which suspended operations in January after authorities blocked its exports and seized its gold stock.
Barrick Mining, previously called Barrick Gold, has said operations can only resume when the Malian government removes the restrictions on gold exports imposed in November.

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Mali hearing on Barrick's suspended Loulo-Gounkoto complex adjourned to June 12
Mali hearing on Barrick's suspended Loulo-Gounkoto complex adjourned to June 12

TimesLIVE

timea day ago

  • TimesLIVE

Mali hearing on Barrick's suspended Loulo-Gounkoto complex adjourned to June 12

A Malian court has adjourned until June 12 a hearing on whether to put the Loulo-Gounkoto gold mining complex, suspended since January due to a dispute between its owner Barrick Mining and Mali's government, under provisional administration, a judge said on Thursday. The government's request to appoint an administrator comes amid soaring gold prices, and signals its desire to end the standoff and reopen the complex. Granting the request would represent a major escalation of a years-long dispute over taxes and ownership between the West African country and the Canadian miner, which suspended operations in January after authorities blocked its exports and seized its gold stock. Barrick Mining, previously called Barrick Gold, has said operations can only resume when the Malian government removes the restrictions on gold exports imposed in November.

Elon Musk's X crash-out: Could he be deported to South Africa?
Elon Musk's X crash-out: Could he be deported to South Africa?

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In the broiling shadow of rocket flames and broadband dreams, the inconvenient truths of Elon Musk's techno-utopia are being tidily shuffled out of frame. Canadian director Julien Elie's haunting new black-and-white documentary film, Shifting Baselines, does not shout its message. It doesn't need to. The scorched landscapes of Boca Chica, Texas, where Elon Musk's SpaceX has set up shop, speak for themselves. They whisper of seabirds gone silent, of beaches turned to junkyards, and of a natural world redrawn by a billionaire's imagination. Back in South Africa, the airwaves have been thick with chatter about Musk's Starlink satellite network finally getting a potential regulatory green light to operate here after sustained pressure from Musk himself and the Trump administration. Some have hailed the prospect of Musk's high-speed internet in rural areas as a form of digital salvation for South Africans marooned, in a communications sense, in the hinterland. 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Some describe the spectacle of a SpaceX launch as their 'Apollo moment'. SpaceX employees scrawl 'We are explorers' on bollards. But the documentary carefully strips away the romance to reveal a more uncomfortable truth. The rockets and satellites rise and return from land and skies now scarred by the vehicles of Musk's monomaniacal, megalomaniacal ambition. This is the paradox at the heart of the Musk myth. His obsession with space colonisation is sold as a response to climate collapse on Earth. Yet in pursuing that dream, he accelerates the very forces he claims to resist. The rockets that might someday touch down on Mars are poisoning the skies of Earth today. Each new satellite that promises to bridge digital divides also quietly widens the environmental ones. All the while, climate change — once seemingly the moral rallying cry of a generation — appears to be quietly slipping off the agenda. The inevitable reports are now emerging, a veritable flurry this past weekend alone, about the jobs that are already being lost to AI. What is virtually absent from the discourse is the ruinous environmental impact of the Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT: a November 2024 study found that just 16% of respondents were aware of the huge amount of water required to cool AI servers. Shifting Baselines invites us to look beyond the dazzle of innovation from the tech industry with which we are all bombarded daily to the dull, persistent erosion of the real world. It asks us to consider what we are losing in our quest to win the future — as the sky fills up with ghosts. DM here.

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