#mineral-deal

#mineral-deal

Nearly half of firms (48%) expected turnover to grow over the next 12 months in the first quarter of the year, up from 42% in the final quarter of 2025.

The Sprott Junior Copper Miners ETF is the sharpest instrument for investors seeking direct exposure to copper prices, tracking the Nasdaq Sprott Junior Copper Miners Index. This fund focuses solely on copper equities, avoiding dilution from other metals.

China's exports have decelerated as the Iran war starts to affect global demand and supply chains, according to Gary Ng, a senior economist for Asia Pacific at French bank Natixis.

In late 2025, the United States shocked the world by suspending global health aid, leading experts to predict 700,000 additional deaths annually, primarily among children. This prompted the US to propose unusual bilateral health agreements with developing countries, which have drawn criticism for being exploitative.

Korea Zinc, which it described as one of the world's largest smelters, is in talks with major US technology firms to recycle data center waste and extract rare earth. The move comes almost one year to the day after China announced immediate export controls on seven more rare earth elements critical to enterprise IT hardware manufacturing.

China controls the overwhelming majority of global rare earth processing capacity, a figure that has remained structurally stable for nearly two decades despite sustained Western policy attention. The problem has never been geology. It's always been industrial chemistry at scale.

These polymetallic nodules, as they're known, take millions of years to form, slowly accumulating metals like nickel, cobalt and manganese. That's made them a target for mining companies, looking to feed the world's growing hunger for materials that go into advanced batteries and other technologies.

A former miner at the site told The Associated Press there have been repeated landslides because the tunnels are dug by hand, poorly constructed, and left without maintenance. "People dig everywhere, without control or safety measures. In a single pit, there can be as many as 500 miners, and because the tunnels run parallel, one collapse can affect many pits at once," Clovis Mafare said.

During a meeting at the White House last month, Trump administration officials urged an Australian mining executive to sell his firm's interest in a major African lithium project to a US company an unusual session that offers a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the administration's deal-brokering as it pursues an ambitious and controversial policy on critical minerals. People familiar with the Jan. 21 meeting described it as an effort by the White House and US State Department to persuade Perth-based AVZ