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Franconia shareholders have approved an agreement whereby Duluth will acquire all of the outstanding common shares of Franconia, and Franconia will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Duluth. Franconia's assets are expected to be rolled into Twin Metals Minnesota LLC, a Duluth (60%) and Antofagasta plc (40%) joint venture.

Antofagasta will pay a special dividend of 100 cents a share, the Chilean miner said on Tuesday as it posted a jump in full-year earnings on higher copper prices and production. Earnings per share rose to 106.7 cents, from 67.7 cents, as revenue grew 54.5 percent to $4.58 billion.

Copper Canyon Resources is getting more for its Copper Canyon property along with a spin-off company to develop its other exploration assets.

Great Panther Silver Limited has updated its mineral resources at the company's 100%-owned Topia silver-gold-lead-Zinc mine in Durango, Mexico. The 2011 mineral resource estimate, by Vancouver-based Roscoe Postle Associates (RPA), comprises measured & indicated ("M & I") mineral resources of 171,000 tonnes at 864g/t silver, 1.56g/t gold, 7.53% lead and 4.37% zinc (7.44 million silver equivalent ounces), a 36.3% increase over the 2009 resource estimate.

Papuan Precious Metals (TSX VENTURE:PAU)(OTCQX:PAUFF) announced that it has received geochemical results from 25 rock samples collected at its 100% owned Ioleu […]

Shareholders of Lundin Mining Corp. and Inmet Mining Corp. will have two more weeks before they are asked to vote on a friendly merger of the two entities. Canadian Press said the posptponement of the shareholder meetings, from March 14 to March 28, was decided on the weekend after a hostile takeover bid was announced last week by Equinox Minerals: The reason for the postponement is to allow time for shareholders to receive and review the recommendation of the board of directors in relation to the Equinox (TSX:EQN) bid, Lundin said Sunday in a news release.

A landslide Saturday near Freeport McMorran's Grasberg mine left thousands of workers stranded, but was not expected to impact operations at the world's largest copper mine, a company spokesperson told Reuters: A weekend landslide buried a key road access tunnel to Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc's Grasberg mine in Papua, Indonesia, leaving thousands of workers stranded, but a company spokesman said operations were continuing as normal. Freeport is the world's largest publicly traded copper miner, while Grasberg has the world's largest recoverable reserves of copper and the largest gold reserves.

Responding to rising metals prices and more stable markets, most mining companies increased exploration budgets in 2010. The result was a 45% increase in estimated worldwide nonferrous metals exploration spending over 2009. Regionally, Latin America (led by Mexico, Peru, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina) was the top exploration destination in 2010-a position it has held for the better part of two decades-while Canada was the top country overall. Gold was the leading target, attracting more than half the global exploration budget total, with copper a distant second.

Jiangxi Copper, China’s top copper producer, sees copper prices rising this year as supply remains tight and demand continues to increase.