Caterpillar reshuffles top management for mining divisions

Gold mines in Mali are an underexploited treasure trove for commodity investors, the supervisory board chairman of German-listed Pearl Gold told Reuters in an interview, Mineweb reports.

Twenty four miners were trapped in a flooded iron ore mine in east China's Shandong Province, the rescue command center said Monday. Previously, 21 miners were believed to be trapped in the mine.

Chronic labour shortages in resource-rich Western Australia could put mining projects at risk, as the state struggles to plug a shortfall of skilled workers set to balloon to 150,000 by 2017.

Five Turkish companies have been named among the world's biggest steel producers. ANKARA- Turkish companies Erdemir Group, Habas, Icdas, Diler Group and Colakoglu Metalurji were included in the world's leading steel & metal markets publication Metal

Peabody Energy has teamed up with ArcelorMittal to offer $5 billion for Australia's Macarthur Coal , the world's biggest producer of pulverised coal, as demand for steel-making raw materials intensifies. The cash offer of A$15.50 a share represents a 40-percent premium to Monday's close and comes just a day after Australia unveiled a plan to tax carbon emissions from the nation's worst polluters, or about 500 companies, including coal miners.

Much has been made of China’s insatiable appetite for the world’s natural resources but demand growth from another Asian giant is changing the dynamics of the global steel market. Indian demand for steel grew 10 percent last year, helping push global demand to a record 1.4 billion tons in 2010. Over the past two years, India’s renewed economic growth has brought a dramatic increase in the country’s steel production as well as domestic consumption.

While Western mining multinationals are conspicuous in their absence from any bids for Afghanistan's vast resources of copper and iron ore Tata Steel on Thursday joined other Indian steelmakers to bid for the Hajigak iron ore deposits 130km west of Kabul. So far only China has made any firm commitment to the country's mining sector with state-owned Metallurgical Corp's successful $3.4bn bid to build a copper mine – and a $6bn railway to go with it – that should enter production in 2014.

Brazil's Vale , the world's top iron ore miner, expects prices of the steelmaking raw material to remain above $150 a tonne for at least the next five years on tight global supplies, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. Guilherme Cavalcanti, Vale's chief financial officer, said miners would struggle to meet booming Asian demand, according to the newspaper.

Unrest and strikes in Indonesia, Chile, Australia and Africa, a shortage of skilled workers in North America and rising labour costs all over the globe are quickly becoming the most serious downsides of a mining boom that started almost a decade ago. While a historically high overall jobless rate is masking spiking wages in the resources sector in the US, workers in emerging markets are shutting down operations of mining companies deemed not to be sharing record profits fairly.