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Gold train hunter strikes GOLD with discovery of priceless 500-year-old renaissance wall art – by Stuart Dowell (The First News – March 4, 2019)

https://www.thefirstnews.com/

A Polish explorer who spent years hunting for a Nazi gold train has finally struck gold following the discovery of 24 priceless renaissance wall portraits dating back 500 years.

Piotr Koper made his sensational discovery after finding the portraits hidden behind the plastered walls of a palace he was renovating in the village of Struga near Wrocław.

The construction entrepreneur and lover of local mysteries was carefully lowering the remains of a dome that once covered the palace ballroom when he noticed fragments of paintings under old plasterwork.

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Europe aims to take its place on the global EV battery production stage – by Amanda Stutt (Mining.com – March 28, 2019)

http://www.mining.com/

The European Commission is eyeing opportunities within the EU’s minerals and mining sector, and has put forward, in its Strategic Action Plan (SAP) on batteries, a comprehensive set of targeted measures to make Europe a global leader in sustainable battery production and use.

The SAP focuses on including raw materials research and innovation, financing and investment, standardization, regulation, and trade and skills development to secure a sustainable supply of battery raw materials.

In his opinion piece in the EU Observer, Raw Materials: ‘holy grail’ of 21st century industrial policy, Maros Sefcovic, Vice President of the European Commission in charge of the Energy Union, said that Europe has world-leading technologies as well as high environmental and social standards, and that the EU aims to ensure that mining is no longer the polluting industry of the past.

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Lab-Grown Diamonds Shake Up The Diamond Industry – by Cardiff Garcia and Sally Herships (NPR.org – March 28, 2019)

https://www.npr.org/

A lot of money is pouring into the global diamond industry, but demand for diamonds has been less than lustrous of late. A new player might be changing up the industry – diamonds grown in labs.

AILSA CHANG, HOST: The global market for diamond jewelry is worth $80 billion a year. Money is flooding into this industry, but why when demand for diamonds isn’t as lustrous as it once was? Cardiff Garcia and Sally Herships have more from the Planet Money podcast The Indicator.

CARDIFF GARCIA, BYLINE: So marriage rates are on the decline. At the same time, the cost of producing diamonds is still obviously very high. You have to mine diamonds, which is labor-intensive. It’s dangerous. It’s expensive. And of course diamonds are a dwindling natural resource. There’s only so many of them in the ground. That leads us to our mystery. Why is all this money pouring into the diamond space?

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Rock-throwing protesters repel Peru government negotiators in dispute over Chinese copper mine – by Marco Aquino and Mitra Taj (Reuters U.K. – March 27, 2019)

https://uk.reuters.com/

LIMA (Reuters) – A government negotiating team sent to Peru’s southern copper belt to calm rising tensions at a Chinese-owned mine was repelled by indigenous protesters who hurled rocks at its helicopter on Wednesday, a government official said.

Peruvian President Martin Vizcarra’s government had tasked the team, led by three ministers, with finding a peaceful end to a 51-day road blockade that has choked off access to Chinese miner MMG Ltd’s Las Bambas mine, one of the country’s largest copper producers.

However, protesters used slingshots to hurl rocks at the ministers’ helicopter when it arrived at the blockade, where they had hoped to restart talks with representatives of the indigenous community of Fuerabamba, Development Minister Paola Bustamante, part of the team, said in a televised interview.

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PM scores a direct hit on the core of Brand Trudeau – by Matt Gurney (National Post – March 29, 2019)

https://nationalpost.com/

Wednesday night’s debacle had nothing to do with SNC-Lavalin. Trudeau was in a safe Liberal space. And he screwed it up

The prime minister who we saw Wednesday night is about as far from the Justin Trudeau who campaigned for the top job in 2015 as can be imagined.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a true believer or one who thinks the prime minister’s entire public persona is a carefully created political act. In either case, you’d be baffled after the performance.

Trudeau was in Toronto, at the gorgeous downtown Omni King Edward Hotel, for a meeting with top Liberal donors. The event was for members of the so-called Laurier Club — those Liberal supporters who donate the maximum to the party each year. If you’re under 35, $750 a year gets you into the club.

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Russia’s Richest Man Plans Crypto Tokens Backed by Palladium – by Yuliya Fedorinova (Bloomberg News – March 27, 2019)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

MMC Norilsk Nickel PJSC and its billionaire chief Vladimir Potanin are planning several digital platforms, including using crypto tokens for trading palladium.

The world’s top palladium producer is in talks with Swiss authorities about issuing tokens by its Switzerland-based palladium fund, and may eventually expand the concept to other metals, Potanin said in an interview in Moscow.

“People more and more tend to use decentralized networks and platforms that don’t have a main operator,” he said. “We want to be active participants of this process,” as trading in digital tokens has many advantages, he said.

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30 years to fix Western alienation. One Trudeau to revive it – by Kelly McParland (National Post – March 29, 2019)

https://nationalpost.com/

It’s remarkable how quickly Trudeau has eroded decades of effort to reassure Westerners about their place in Confederation

Despite the pressures of a struggling economy and the best efforts of numerous rivals to get under her skin, Rachel Notley has always managed to maintain the air of a fairly civil disposition as premier of Alberta.

It was noteworthy, then, when she let loose Friday on Senators in Ottawa, who had decided to skip Alberta while holding hearings on an oil tanker bill that will have profound implications for the province.

“I gotta tell you, this is kind of an unprecedented stampede of stupid,” Notley said. “I’m stunned. Albertans deserve better from Canada.”

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Opinion: Why no oil tanker bans for Quebec? (Calgary Herald – December 15, 2018)

https://calgaryherald.com/

Bill C-48, currently before the Senate, proposes to ban Canadian oil tanker transport for northern portions of Canada’s West Coast.

Canadians, particularly those 160,000 unemployed Albertans who face an increasingly bleak festive season, may recall the outrage and protests that accompanied the proposal for Energy East, a 4,600-kilometre, $12-billion oil pipeline designed to carry 1.1 million barrels per day of oilsands crude from Alberta to refineries on the East Coast for export overseas.

The now-defunct proposal by TransCanada included an oil tanker terminal to be constructed at Cacouna, Que. In the face of mounting protests, then-premier Philippe Couillard advocated against the proposed terminal.

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Brazil’s Vale slashes iron ore sales estimate after dam burst – by Marta Nogueira and Roberto Samora (Reuters U.S. – March 28, 2019)

https://www.reuters.com/

RIO DE JANEIRO/SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Brazilian miner Vale SA on Thursday estimated selling up to 75 million tonnes less iron ore this year, after several mines were halted following its second deadly dam burst in less than four years.

The estimate, which is 20 percent below its prior forecast, is the latest blow to Vale from the collapse at Brumadinho, which killed some 300 people and forced the world’s largest iron ore exporter to fire its chief executive officer earlier this month.

Chief Financial Officer Luciano Siani said in a call with analysts that under the most optimistic scenario, 2019 sales would decline about 50 million tonnes.

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The Lady Muckers take on the 41st Annual International Collegiate Mining Competition – by Jennifer Sande (Nevada Today – March 27, 2019)

https://www.unr.edu/

The Mackay Muckers had enough female recruits for both men’s and a women’s teams for the first time in five years.

When asked if she could think of a more proper term to describe her female team members other than “badass”, Claire Roberts, Captain of the Lady Muckers – the Mackay Muckers women’s team, thought for a minute before answering. “Kickass? That’s not much better, is it?” Roberts asked.

The “kickass” Lady Muckers competed on Friday, March 22nd in the 41st Annual International Collegiate Mining Competition in Virginia City alongside teams from all over the country and the world.

The teams compete in old-school mining techniques such as single jack hand steel (hammering a steel chisel into concrete by hand), jackleg drilling, hand mucking (shoveling “muck” or dirt into a mine cart and running it down and back a length of track), gold panning, track stand (quickly assembling an un-assembling a rail-cart track), and swede saw (sawing through a 4×4″ block of wood).

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More than a third of gold mines in Congo exposed to Ebola — report – by Cecilia Jamasmie (Mining.com – March 27, 2019)

http://www.mining.com/

More than 35% of the gold mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are at risk of being directly or indirectly affected by the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the country, the world’s top cobalt miner and a significant copper and gold producer, global consultancy Verisk Maplecroft has found.

The number of people infected with the often fatal virus has now exceeded 1,000 cases, the World Health Organization confirmed, making it the second-worst outbreak in history, with daily rates on the rise as response workers continue to face violence.

Together with the obvious risks for those working in the country’s gold mines, companies are now facing delays in their exports, as part of Ebola prevention methods being implemented at border checkpoints, Indigo Ellis, Verisk Maplecroft’s lead DRC Analyst warns.

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South African mining firms seek charter changes over past black ownership deals (Reuters U.K. – March 27, 2019)

https://uk.reuters.com/

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – Mining companies have requested a judicial review of South Africa’s 2018 mining charter to change clauses related to transactions made in the past to increase black ownership, an industry body said on Wednesday.

In a bid to rectify the wealth disparities of apartheid more than two decades after the end of white minority rule, South Africa has demanded that a proportion of a mining company’s shares are owned by black investors.

Originally set at 26 percent, the black ownership level was raised to 30 percent in 2017, although companies that had already achieved 26 percent were not required to meet the higher target.

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Church of England Pensions Board joins UN to conduct mine tailing storage review – by Sunniva Kolostyak (Pensions Age – March 28, 2019)

https://www.pensionsage.com/

The Church of England Pensions Board and the AP Funds’ Ethics Council will represent the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) in a co-convened independent review of the standard of tailings storage facilities.

The review is launched together with The International Council on Mining & Metals (ICMM) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to establish an international standard on the facilities.

The initiative comes as a response to the recent tragedy in Brumadinho, Brazil, where over 200 people died and a further 100 are missing, after Vale S.A’s tailing dam collapsed in January.

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Commodity Traders Say More Needs to Be Done to Promote Women – by Andy Hoffman and Mark Burton (Bloomberg News – March 27, 2019)

https://www.bloombergquint.com/

(Bloomberg) — More needs to be done to make the commodities industry welcoming to young women, who are less willing to put up with the sexist culture their older peers endured, female executives from trading houses, banks and mining companies said.

“It isn’t the Wolf of Wall Street, but it is a tough environment,” Wendy Moss, a veteran trader at Trafigura Group, said at the FT Global Commodities Summit in Lausanne. “If you are prepared for that, it can be a very rewarding career.”
Women account for less than 5 percent of senior management at top trading houses, Bloomberg reported last year, and companies are under pressure to improve gender parity.

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COLUMN-Struggling small miners may lead to bigger industry woes – by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.S. – March 28, 2019)

https://www.reuters.com/

SINGAPORE, March 28 (Reuters) – Small miners are finding it increasingly difficult to raise capital to fund new ventures despite the positive demand outlook for several commodities and a world still largely awash with cheap credit.

The problems facing these ‘junior’ mining explorers may also have implications beyond a bunch of seemingly inconsequential companies struggling to progress. How they cope is likely to affect how the mining industry as a whole goes from exploring for new resources to actually producing raw materials.

Under the traditional model, would-be junior miners raised seed capital in order to drill exploration holes to confirm the presence of a resource. These companies then sought listings on miner-friendly stock exchanges, such as those in Sydney and Toronto, and used the money raised from the listing to advance the project.

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