COPPER

Peru's mining firms have agreed to pay higher royalties in an overhaul of the current system, sources on both sides of negotiations between companies and leftist President Ollanta Humala's government said on Tuesday.

South Africa's rand fell as much as 1.9 percent against the dollar on Tuesday, weighed down by a weak growth outlook for the country's main trading partner bloc and showing the worst performance among its emerging market peers.

Premarket trading of gold and silver mining companies were mixed Tuesday in a tight range as stock index futures pointed to a lower open and commodities like crude oil and copper were down.

Yukon Nevada Gold Corp said its quarterly profit rose five-fold due to higher production and a gain on warrants, and it expects to achieve production run rate of 150,000 ounces by end of 2011.

G-Resources Group Ltd , backed by Mount Kellett Capital and BlackRock Inc , is delaying production of its $1 billion gold mine in Indonesia to the end of the first quarter next year due to adverse weather conditions and harder ground conditions than previously expected.

If you thought BBC America was all about time-traveling doctors and men behaving badly in cars, get ready to adjust your TV set.

With recession fears weighing on equity markets, resource investors would do well to steer clear of speculative Canadian mining plays and put their cash into producing miners with strong balance sheets.

Anvil Mining Ltd said it has completed construction of a new plant at its Kinsevere copper mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo and commercial production from the facility is set to begin in the current quarter.

An anorexic under doctor's orders to put on weight might fret unnecessarily about getting fat one day.

For around $2 a day some Afghan children as young as 10 work long hours in the country's coal mines with no safety gear and, until now, no government mining policy to protect them.

Physical gold is the ultimate collateral because it has no credit risk, according to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch?s Global Commodity Research team.

The companies whose shares are moving in pre-market trade on Thursday are: Freeport Mcmoran Copper, News Corp, Ford Motor, PPL Corp, Regions Financial, Sara Lee, NYSE Euronext, American International Group, Alpha Natural Resources, Lincoln National Corp and Citigroup.

An advisory panel to the Department of Energy stopped short of putting forth stricter regulations for the use of hydraulic fracturing to drill for natural gas, but recommended stricter oversight of the practice, known as ?fracking.?

U.S. stock futures rose 1 percent on Thursday after a sharp drop on Wall Street overnight, limiting losses in Asian share markets, though the focus was shifting to how Europe reacts to a sovereign debt crisis that is now threatening its banking system.

Verizon Communications' new high-speed fiber optic network will never make as much money as its old copper network, an executive said on Wednesday.

Gold is set to widen its premium over platinum after hitting parity for the first time in 2-1/2 years this week, with no end yet in sight to the potent cocktail of fear factors that are benefiting safe havens at the expense of cyclical assets.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch?s Global Commodity Research team announced that they?ve rebalanced their actively managed commodity indices in favor of non-cyclical commodities such as gold.

Oil led a rebound among commodities on Wednesday as investors went bargain hunting for riskier assets after the U.S. Federal Reserve promised to extend near-zero interest rates for two more years.

Investors pondering a gold investment have a number of alternative routes into the precious metal, several of which are outlined below.

Toronto's main stock market index sank more than 3 percent to its lowest point in nearly a year on Monday as a downgrade of the U.S. credit rating shook investor confidence globally and drove commodity prices sharply lower.

U.S. stock index futures tracked a sharp drop in global equity markets on Monday after rating agency Standard & Poor's cut the top-tier AAA credit rating of the United States, rattling already-jittery investors.