VIDEO: CAT lights up lantern festival in remote Chinese village

London’s AIM-listed Bellzone Mining announced this morning that its Forécariah joint venture project in Guinea has received approval to complete the first blast at Yomboyeli, allowing Bellzone to kick off iron-ore production by the end of the first quarter this year.

Canadian Junior miner Aquila Resources Inc. (TSX:AQA) announced this morning it has acquired the Five Mile Lake zinc project near Ely, Minnesota.

Associated Press reports that two military planes laden with 17 tons of silver and gold coins recovered from a sunken Spanish galleon have touched down in Madrid.

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.

Iran may be diverting uranium for use in weapons research, according to a report by the UN International Energy Agency (IEA), a nuclear watchdog.

On February 16, 2012, the Polish coal mining company Lubelski Węgiel Bogdanka S.A. smashed the world record for daily production from a plow-equipped longwall, with an output of 24,400 tonnes of coal from a single face.

Alpha Natural Resources took a $.73 billion hit in the fourth-quarter, but the US coal producer, the third largest of coking coal in the world, said it has a strategy to counter weak US coal markets by cutting production and concentrating on met coal used in steelmaking.

London-based Vedanta Group (LON:VED) announced Saturday a merger of two of its subsidiaries, Sesa Goa and Sterlite Industries, into a new corporate entity to be named Sesa Sterlite.

Banro's Twangiza oxide mine poured its first gold Q4 2011and it owns four additional licences along the same rich gold belt in the east of the country. After bumping up its debt offering to $175 million on Friday the company says it can now start building a second oxide mine.