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tigue that can lead to fatal accidents.
• Life is cheap in the mining camps. Deaths go unrecorded and the mercury they use to bind gold flecks compounds the risks. It doesn't just seep into the food chain. It poisons them and their families, too.
• A new threat now looms for the estimated 20,000 wildcat miners who toil in a huge scar of denuded Amazon rainforest known as La Pampa, an area nearly three times the size of Washington, D.C.
• Peru's government declared all informal mining illegal on April 19 and began a crackdown. It raided the older boomtown of Huepetuhe, dynamiting backhoes, trucks and generators. Troops even destroyed the outboard motors of canoes used to ferry mining equipment across the Inambari river.
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• BAGHDAD (AP) -- Fighting in Iraq's western Anbar province, now in its fifth month, appears to have bogged down, with government forces unable to drive out Islamic militants who took over one of the area's main cities. But the impact is being felt much further, with the repercussions rippling through the country's economy to hit consumers and businesses.
• The large, desert province is a major crossroads. The main highways linking Baghdad and other parts of Iraq to Syria and Jordan run through it. So fighting has not only dislodged thousands of residents from their homes and forced shutdowns of their businesses. It has also disrupted shipping, inflating prices of goods in Baghdad and elsewhere. Fears of the road have gotten so bad Iraq has had to stop shipments of oil to Jordan.
• Anwar Salah, co-owner of al-Baqiee travel agency in Baghdad, said his company used to run more than 13 trips a day by SUVs shuttling passengers between Baghdad and the Jordanian capital, Amman.
• Now people avoid the highway, which runs near the flashpoint Anbar cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, fearing militant checkpoints or clashes. So his firm is down to one trip every other day, and profits have plunged by 90 percent, he said.
• "Most of the drivers who used to work for me are now either jobless or working in other professions," he said. "We are part of the country's miserable situation."
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