Early on Saturday morning, Reuters reports, in northern Myanmar, where some of the world’s most desirable jade is produced, a mountain of mining debris gave way, triggering a landslide. More than 100 people were missing on Sunday, and 97 bodies had been pulled from the wreckage.

The Arctic, located at the top your globes, is a very cold place covered in snow and ice. For now. But not for long. There are plenty of business people already making plans to industrialize the hell out of this frozen wasteland.

On the eastern edges of Johannesburg, in Benoni, rescue workers are attempting to free more than 200 miners who are trapped in an abandoned gold mine, after it was being worked illegally for gold.

Generally speaking, when someone purchases a house, they assume that they have also purchased the rights to the land that sits directly beneath that house. Not so fast, suburbanites! You may have already signed away your right to not have fracking underneath your back yard.

Rent-a-cops hired to guard the site of a Wisconsin mining operation have begun stalking the woods around the mine in balaclavas and camouflage fatigues, all while armed with semi-automatic rifles, and an extra handgun holstered at the hip, just in case. Meet the security guards of the future!

Three more bodies were recovered today bringing the official death toll to 17 for a mine collapse in Papua, Indonesia. The mine, which extracted both gold and copper, is owned by a Phoenix-based company.

Four lawyers face an ethics complaint after helpfully pointing out that a study of mountaintop mining and birth defects in Appalachia "failed to account for consanquinity [sic], one of the most prominent sources of birth defects." In non-legalese: maybe those babies have defects because of how hillbillies like to screw within the family all the time.

We all know that broke, friendless presidential candidate Newt Gingrich loves Tiffany & Co enough to have held a $250,000 - $500,000 credit account at the high-end jeweler. But did you know he loves the place so much he had a second, $500,000 - $1 million line of credit? And also he dyed his hair Tiffany blue?

Cobalt Coal Corp., a West Virginia mining company, has its own super-cool reality TV show on Spike TV about how dangerous its mines are, just like those Deadliest Catch guys. Unfortunately, the Federal Mine Safety and Health Administration was watching, and fined Cobalt for safety violations that it saw happening, on TV. Now if only they could do a reality show about Goldman Sachs. [AP, photo via Spike]

The small Nevada towns near the 'Burning Man' festival site are effectively jobless and broke after USG Corp., which owns a gypsum mine and produces wallboard, announced the closure of its local operations. What will happen to the drug festival?

Workers today began drilling a test shaft at the site of last week's mine explosion in New Zealand to check deadly gas levels before rescue operations can get under way. 29 men are missing inside the Park River mine. [Guardian]

In a hilariously predictable Wall Street Journal column today, Daniel Henninger writes, for real: "It needs to be said. The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism." How can these miners ever adequately thank capitalism?