ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar – A sapphire rush has brought tens of thousands of people into the remote rainforests of eastern Madagascar, disfiguring a protected environmental area and prompting calls for ...

ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar — A sapphire rush has brought tens of thousands of people into the remote rainforests of eastern Madagascar, disfiguring a protected environmental area and prompting calls for ...

Knee-deep in muddy water, a 10-year-old child and a woman with braided hair lean over a large sieve, washing earth and rocks, their eyes clenched against the filthy splashing water. They are among the ...

ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar -- A sapphire rush has drawn tens of thousands of people to the remote rain forests of eastern Madagascar, disfiguring a protected environmental area and prompting calls for ...

ILAKAKA, Madagascar – A stone's throw from the main road that traverses this town, you can visit a hole in the ground. It's not just any hole, though. Its circumference is the size of a car tire and ...

Chart: Change in peatland cover in Indonesia and Malaysia between 2000 and 2010. Background satellite image courtesy of Microsoft/Bing Maps and NASA, design by mongabay.com. Click image to enlarge.

The unregulated free-for-all trade in sapphires is causing growing concern in Madagascar, with allegations of widespread corruption and an increasing use of child labour. The precious stone was ...

An estimated 45,000 miners – and possibly more since mining began in October – are working the soil and in some cases tearing up trees to find valuable sapphires. Concerns about environmental ...

Since the discovery of sapphires in 1998 in this town in Madagascar the population of Ilakaka has swelled. In the search for the precious blue stone, makeshift mining practices have emerged using rope ...

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ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar (AP) — A sapphire rush has brought tens of thousands of people into the remote rainforests of eastern Madagascar, disfiguring a protected environmental area and prompting ...