But in the town of Mongbwalu, a key battleground for Mr Lubanga's men, they will be digging for gold instead.

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The government says the mining is illegal, but in this rural Muslim region of north-western Nigeria it has been going on for generations - and it was a discovery of greater deposits that has led to the recent boom in digging for gold.

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Pilar Sanders also filed a separate suit against her husband and his daughter, Deiondra, after she called her stepmother a "gold-digging (expletive)" and "the number one gold digger of the year" in Twitter posts.

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In 1998, builders found a chest of gold while digging a new car park.

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The social x-rays do not make a reappearance, but the gold-digging second wives do.

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Her oily, gold-digging, hypocrite accomplice in anachronistic 1960s naughtiness Peter (Matthew Marsh), her diffident gay son Nick (Rory Kinnear) and raunchy daughter Libby's (Helen McCrory) bickering are great performances, but don't actually add up to a play.

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Virtual shopping is today's gold rush with prospectors digging for deals on Web sites like mysimon.com owned by CNET Networks and eBay 's Shopping.com.

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Next came ditch digging, which would allow water to come near areas where gold was found.

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And as Congo crumbles, it grows harder to plunder: operations at Ituri's vast Kilomoto gold mine, for example, have virtually ceased since local peasants started digging up its airstrip and panning the dirt for ore.

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