Global mining deals picking up, but far from returning to boom times

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.

Recruiters in Western Australia are seeing a steady flow of people heading into the state in search of lucrative jobs in the mining industry, but they need to be realistic about the salaries they can receive and the training they need, Perth Now reports.

Recruitment agencies told The Sunday Times that highly skilled positions, such as heavy diesel fitters, drillers and boilermakers, were in shortest supply and workers with experience in most areas of the resources industry were highly sought after. Hays regional director Simon Winfield said people often thought they could get jobs on mines without any qualifications and were "misguided" about salaries.

Reuters reports that nickel went untraded today, but still managed to fall as copper, aluminum and zinc also fell.

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

Copper fell on Monday as concerns over Italy's sovereign debt curtailed appetite for risky assets, but a series of strikes in producer countries highlighted supply constraints and lent support to prices. Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange traded at $9, 581 a tonne in official rings , down from the $9,661 close on Friday.

Diamonds have the potential to act as building blocks for quantum computing. In an article published in Nature Physics last month, a group of researchers found that the nitrogen vacancy centre in a diamond can be used for quantum memory. The paper was published by the Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computation, University of California, Santa Barbara, California; and the Department of Physics, University of Konstanz. Researchers named were G. D. Fuchs, P. V. Klimov, and D. D. Awschalom.

Europe's largest copper producer Aurubis sees a trend for rising copper prices thanks to higher demand for more electronics goods, its chief executive told a German paper. "Even if there may be short-terms price swings in either direction... demand for copper is rising with increasing prosperity in countries such as China," Bernd Drouven told Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

Debt-saddled Greece has a new revenue source in the form of two gold mines that have been approved by the country's environment minister, George Papaconstantinou, FT reported on Friday. The newspaper said that European Goldfields has received final approval to build two large gold mines in northern Greece, named Olympias and Skouries, near Thessaloniki. The AIM-listed miner plans to spend $500 million to build the mines and a total of 1.3 billion euros throughout the life of the mines.

Gold's performance has eclipsed that of gold mining stocks this year, but gold equities now are likely to take the upper hand as the flow of cheap US cash slows and miners boast juicy margins and good growth prospects. Gold's status as a quasi-currency and safe haven has helped pushed the price of the metal up about 20 per cent since the start of the year to above $US1,520 an ounce, making it one of the top performing asset classes of 2011.