The Latest Breaking News from Resolution Copper

BHP and Rio Tinto want to mine one of the largest copper deposits in North America, if they can get a hoped-for transfer of federal forest land in Arizona.

Executives of two of the world’s biggest mining companies, BHP and Rio Tinto, have lobbied at the White House as part of their long-running bid to develop a vast copper mine in the US.

OAK FLAT, Ariz. — On a recent morning about an hour outside Phoenix, the pounding of tribal drums reverberated across the desert from a stand of oaks in the Tonto National Forest, where nearly 20 men had packed into a squat green sweat lodge to pray.

The Arizona mine project won't move forward until more discussions with Indigenous communities.

The U.S. Forest Service has told a federal court it is not sure when it could approve a land swap allowing Rio Tinto Plc to develop the Resolution Copper mine in Arizona, a surprising reversal that boosts several Native American groups opposed to the project.

Resolution Copper is one court ruling away from destroying one of the Apaches’ holiest sites.

Imagine that a giant mining company announces plans to dig down deep beneath the Vatican to extract precious minerals, collapsing St. Peter’s Basilica into a cavernous pit. While this unlikely scenario would be met with near-universal outrage, it’s effectively what’s happening in southeastern Arizona, to almost no national scrutiny.

Native American tribal members fighting plans for an enormous copper mine on land they consider sacred say they are increasingly worried U.S. officials will move forward on the project even as they await a federal appellate court ruling in the case

An Apache group battling a foreign firm that wants to build one of the largest U.S. copper mines on what tribal members say is sacred land is getting a new chance to make its point to a full federal appeals court panel