De Beers to host first auction for third-party exceptional polished diamonds

Rough diamond prices were expected to continue climbing “across the market” this year, London-listed Gem Diamonds said on Monday.

MINING.com counts more than 90 billionaires involved in minerals, metals and mining on the planet with a combined wealth of well over $300 billion.

Private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. wants to buy the diamond mining operations of BHP Billiton Ltd. and Rio Tinto PLC and merge them to create a challenger to the two diamond industry leaders De Beers and Alrosa, reports The Sunday Times.

A small number of investment professionals around the world are competing behind the scenes to turn the gem into a commodity that would be available to investors in the way that gold has been traded through funds on exchanges.

The decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone brought two unforgettable images to the West: victims of violence whose limbs were hacked off by armed rebels as a warning to civilians; and the term "blood diamonds," referring to the diamonds plucked by hand from alluvial deposits that were smuggled out of the country and used by both sides of the warring factions to fund their vicious campaigns.

Output from the resources industry in the African nation is now the lowest since 1961, the year South Africa left the British Commonwealth and declared itself a republic

MINING.com reported on how opponents and proponents of hydraulic fracturing were using videos and infographics to argue their case. Now a London jeweler, Ingle and Rhode, is taking on the Kimberely Process and using an infographic to explain why, according to the company, that the standard is not up to snuff.

Widely circulated reports that the 88-year old were fighting for his life in a Singapore hospital were deemed to be "lies meant to destabilise Zimbabwe," according to a spokesman.

Alianue Thiam, a rising R&B singer in the U.S.A., is just another celebrity with a side business, although this side business happens […]