Falling Chinese electric car production wrenches lithium price

A new survey by The Economist Intelligence Unit finds when institutional investors interested in frontier markets were asked to choose two regions out of five, two-thirds see Africa – projected to be the fastest growing region on the planet this year – as holding the greatest opportunity.

Thousands of protesters have been converging on Lynas Corporation's new rare earths processing facility in Malaysia according to reports. The Australian producer's website was also hacked over the weekend.

Molycorp, the company in the process of expanding and modernizing a mine and processing plant closed down in 2002, this week announced the sequential start-up of its Project Phoenix rare earth manufacturing facility.

Mining and processing rare earths is a tricky business. Processing the materials is costly, and the supply of the 17 elements used in manufacturing everything from smart phones to electric cars and missile guidance systems is pretty much sewn up by China, which has 95% of the production.

Malaysian residents opposed to a rare earths processing facility have launched a legal challenged that threatens to delay the project put forward by Australia's Lynas Corp.

Nearly 13.7 billion years ago, the universe was made of only hydrogen, helium and traces of lithium — byproducts of the Big Bang. Some 300 million years later, the very first stars emerged, creating additional chemical elements throughout the universe. Since then, giant stellar explosions, or supernovas, have given rise to carbon, oxygen, iron and the rest of the 94 naturally occurring elements of the periodic table.

A $4 billion rare earths deal signed this week between Germany and Kazakhstan is being criticized by human rights groups.

According to a new European Wind Energy Association report a record 71% of all the new power generating capacity installed in the Europe Union in 2011 came from solar panels, offshore and onshore wind turbines and other renewable energy sources. This at the same time as the world's largest clean coal power station project appears stuck in the starting blocks.

IAMGOLD Corporation ("IAMGOLD" or the "Company") today announced that it has declared an inferred resource of 466.8 million tonnes at a grade of 1.65% Total Rare Earth Oxides ("TREO") as a result of its 2011 exploration drilling program conducted on the rare earth elements ("REE") zone adjacent to its Niobec niobium mine near Saguenay, Quebec, Canada.