The nationally televised signing ceremony occurred as the de facto Afghan authorities marked the second anniversary of the withdrawal of all U.S.-led NATO troops from the country after nearly 20 years of war with the then-insurgent Taliban.
Dilawar said other contracts involving Turkish, Iranian and British investments for mining and processing iron ore in Herat would earn the government a 13% share over 30 years. "It will eventually turn Afghanistan into an exporter of iron," he said.
Dollar Mining
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"The Afghan financial and banking sector is almost paralyzed and dysfunctional. Hence, no financial transactions or valuations," Tamim Asey, a former official with the Afghan ministry of mines and petroleum, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
"The supply of goods has been sufficient, but demand is low. Over 50% of Afghan households struggle to maintain their livelihoods and consumption," the report said. It added that the local currency, the Afghani, appreciated against major trading currencies in the first seven months of 2023.
Akhundzada has banned girls from attending schools past the sixth grade and most women from working for the government and nongovernmental aid groups in a country where two-thirds of the population needs humanitarian assistance. The Taliban have closed thousands of women-run salons nationwide. Women are barred from visiting public parks and gyms and undertaking road trips without a male guardian.
Cryptocurrencies have become magnets for illicit activities such as theft and fraud. But one of less-reported crimes is the use of stolen processing power to mine currencies such as Bitcoin and Monero. The proceeds of this theft can then be exchanged for real currency, reaping vast rewards for malicious actors.
Of course, the ruse can be stopped by closing the page that is responsible. Cybersecurity experts have analyzed this kind of activity by counting the web pages that contain this kind of malware and estimating how many times they are visited and for how long.
This malware is designed to be hard to detect. Some malware switches off whenever the user opens the task manager, so the evidence of its activity is hard to see. Other types only switch on when the CPU is idle, on the assumption that the user must be away from the device.
First, some background. Cryptocurrency mining is the process that encrypts a record of transactions so that it cannot be changed or tampered with later. This encryption must be strong enough to make the record almost impossible to reengineer.
The mining process is so intensive that miners often join together in pools. In this way, they combine their processing power and then share out the rewards, which are paid into cryptocurrency wallets.
Cryptomining malware does all this using the processing power of its host computer. It generally works by downloading open-source mining software that does the encrypting, signing into a mining pool and then transferring any rewards into a wallet.
But it is exactly this process that has allowed Pastrana and Suarez-Tangil to analyze the activity of these malicious miners. The malicious code contains details of the pools it connects to and the wallets that funds are paid into.
The researchers simply extract this information on a massive scale. They collected 1 million examples of crypto-mining malware operating between 2007 and 2018. They then analyzed the code involved and ran the malware in a protected sandbox environment to see what it did.
The results of this analysis makes for interested reading. The researchers find that Monero is by far the most popular cryptocurrency for criminals and that the scale of their activity is staggering. Pastrana and Suarez-Tangi say that more than 4.3% of all the Monero cryptocurrency in circulation is the result of criminal activity.
And it is a profitable business. Exchange rates for cryptocurrencies have varied hugely over time. Since there is no way to know when criminals converted their gains, Pastrana and Suarez-Tangi have had to estimate them. But even with conservative estimates, the proceeds are large.
Stopping this illicit activity is not easy, either. During their research, Pastrana and Suarez-Tangi reported illicit wallets to the largest mining pools in the hope they would be banned. But they ran up against two problems. First, some non-cooperative pools refused to ban wallets linked to crypto-mining malware. Second, some successful illicit crypto-mining campaigns used several pools at the same time, making them more resilient to takedown operations.
One countermeasure seems to work well, however. Every now and again, cryptocurrency authorities make changes to the algorithms used to mine the currency. When this happens, the mining software has to be updated.
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Morris Sr., a member of the Douglas Indian Association in southeast Alaska, said his grandparents, aunt, uncle and parents always reminded him that everything they needed was provided by the land there.
The river and its tributaries meander throughout the territories of the Tlingit and the Tahltan peoples, and flow over the international border between British Columbia and Alaska. But for the past 67 years a small, oozing sore has leached untreated heavy metals into the waterways. The abandoned Tulsequah Chief mine in B.C. sits on the Tulsequah River about 10 kilometres upstream from its confluence with the Taku River. Cominco, now part of Teck Resources Ltd., opened the copper, lead and zinc mine in 1951. Cominco closed it six years later. Several companies took the mine over in the intervening years, but none was successful at restarting production.
Morris Sr. first saw the bright orange fluid, known as acid rock drainage, flowing out of a pipe when he was on a hunting trip in the late 1990s. There is no doubt this area is contaminated, he remembers thinking. Numerous water sampling programs have pointed to elevated levels of metals in the Tulsequah River.
Tulsequah Chief is one of several ugly remnants overshadowing a new era of mining aimed at building a low-carbon economy. The industry is looking to a future built on critical minerals needed for batteries, particularly for electric vehicles, but the legacy of past investment booms and a shortfall in the money set aside to deal with cleanup remains.
Over several months, The Narwhal and The Globe and Mail have scoured publicly available records, reviewed financial data and interviewed experts about B.C.'s mine reclamation plan and found that in practice, the province was short $753 million of the estimated cleanup cost in its last financial year and some of the best-capitalized companies have not yet paid for future reclamation costs.
To address this, mining reform advocates are calling for the interim policy to be formalized as enforceable regulations. Mining policy researchers and communities downstream from mines said the regulations should include a better process for more accurately estimating the future costs of cleanup and a shared pool of funds to protect taxpayers from covering costs when disaster strikes.
The federal government is staking its plans for the future economy on big bets on mass electrification and the supply chains that will feed a decades-long shift to renewable energy and electric vehicles in the race to net zero. Critical minerals production is the foundation of that strategy. Global demand for such materials surged to US$320 billion in 2022, doubling during the previous five years.
B.C. does not intend to be left out. Its mining industry is banking on being a major supplier of the ingredients pulled from the earth for batteries used in transport and energy production and storage, such as copper, lithium and molybdenum, to name a few. According to the Mining Association of British Columbia, mining companies are now proposing 16 critical minerals mines, representing capital investments of $36.5 billion. If they all proceed, the mines could dump $10.9 billion in tax revenues into government coffers.
Compared with B.C., other provinces and jurisdictions have varying levels of stringency with security demands. Quebec requires hard financial securities to be put up in full and upfront to guard against a potential bankruptcy while a mine is still in operation. In Ontario, companies that can pass a corporate financial test can self-assure against reclamation cost, but in practice that rarely happens. Instead, almost all provide full security when they file their closure plans.
The province is playing catch-up to address the historical and growing costs of mine cleanup. Some companies have long since gone belly up, leaving taxpayers with millions of dollars in environmental liabilities. Others remain profitable, including some of the largest players in the province, such as Teck and Swiss commodities giant Glencore PLC, and they are still paying for the future remediation of past or currently producing mines.
David Chambers, founder and president of the Montana-based Center for Science in Public Participation, said B.C. is behind most other jurisdictions as it tries to collect the full cost of mining liabilities. Chambers, who has more than 40 years of experience in mineral exploration and development, formed the non-profit corporation to provide technical assistance on mining and water quality to public interest groups and tribal governments. 152ee80cbc
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