A report published this week by Global Witness, an international human rights group, says that companies mining the controversial Marange diamond fields in Zimbabwe have senior personnel drawn from security forces loyal to President Robert Mugabe.

Canadian junior explorer Abcourt Mines (TSX-V:ABI) has intercepted a high-grade silver zone at its Abcourt-Barvue orebody in Quebec.

Gold mining in Colombia is shining bright as major gold players are expected to invest U.S. $ 2,100 million by 2015, reports local newspaper La Republica.

David Hill of Singularity Hub reports that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s new OpenCourseWare program will provide nearly all MIT courses for free on the web, and allow students to study online and earn a certificate of completion. A prototype of the system will be launched this spring.

As government funding has been cut to some schools and others struggle with donations and endowments, institutions are desperate for tuition dollars to cover their expenses, so they are left with little choice but to raise tuition rates (a trend called out by President Obama in his State of the Union address). As the country slowly pulls itself out of a recession and looks to the future for financial stability, it is a crucial time for something big to happen in the educational world.

Unionists from around the world will gather in the Canadian city of Alma, Quebec, from March 30 to April 1, to express their support for locked-out Rio Tinto Alcan workers who are fighting to preserve decent jobs, said international unions representatives on Wednesday.

Peru’s long-running Conga mine dispute moved slightly forward on Tuesday after the government appointed foreign engineers to oversee an independent review of Newmont Mining Corp.'s stalled $4.8 billion gold project, reports La Republica.

A week after announcing substantial profits and the expansion of their vast Western Australia iron ore operations, BHP Billiton (NYSE: BHP) and Rio Tinto (NYSE:RIO) said yesterday that they would spend $US 4.5 billion on the Escondida copper mine in Chile.

Sydney Morning Herald reports that between 3500 and 4000 miners have walked off the job at BHP Billiton's coal operations in Queensland.

Republicans in the US Congress are once again attempting to force through the approval of the Keystone XL project, while the pipeline's backers TransCanada says it could receive approval early in 2013.