Jim Mee, 40, from York, completed the 85-mile crossing of Khovsgol Nuur, a lake in north west Mongolia www.dailymail.com.uk

A hardy British adventurer has become the first to ever ice skate across one of the world’s most barren and inhospitable landscapes - despite not having skated for about 20 years.

Jim Mee, 40, from York, said he meant to pack some skating in before Christmas in the run up to his epic challenge last week but he ran out of time.

Instead he blindly tackled an 85-mile crossing of Khovsgol Nuur in north-west Mongolia - the distance climbing to 100 miles when zig-zags to the edge of the lake to camp were taken into account - skating for nine hours a day for three days, in temperatures plunging to minus 47 degrees Celsius.

Last week, 40-year-old Jim Mee from York completed the 85-mile crossing of Khovsgol Nuur, a lake located 362 miles north west of Mongolia's capital Ulaanbaatar, which freezes solid in winter with the ice reaching up to one-metre-thick +15
Last week, 40-year-old Jim Mee from York completed the 85-mile crossing of Khovsgol Nuur, a lake located 362 miles north west of Mongolia's capital Ulaanbaatar, which freezes solid in winter with the ice reaching up to one-metre-thick

Braving bone-shattering winds and temperatures around minus 47 degrees Celsius, Mee skated for nine hours a day for three days with a support team on hand. He is now the first person ever to skate the lake¿s entire length +15
Braving bone-shattering winds and temperatures around minus 47 degrees Celsius, Mee skated for nine hours a day for three days with a support team on hand. He is now the first person ever to skate the lake’s entire length

Luckily his experience on skis served him well and he completed the frigid traverse unscathed.

Mee is now the first person to ever to skate the lake’s entire length. Talking about his accomplishment, the gutsy globetrotter said: 'Skating across the lake posed [lots of] unique difficulties.

'I was nervous it couldn’t be done. I wasn’t sure if the surface of the lake would be smooth enough to accommodate skating. But this method actually proved to be something of a revelation.

'I skated from dawn ’til dusk, nine hours a day, for three days. It’s a very similar motion to cross-country skiing, where you hit a rhythm and just keep going.

But Mee said the pain was all worth it, as the rewards were immense.

He continued: 'There’s no precipitation in this region so the skies are always clear, meaning the sunrises and sunsets were incredible spectacles.

'And just spending so long in such a bizarre, otherworldly landscape was surreal.

Talking about his accomplishment, Mee said: 'Skating across the lake posed [lots of] unique difficulties. I was nervous it couldn¿t be done. I wasn¿t sure if the surface of the lake would be smooth enough to accommodate skating. But this method actually proved to be something of a revelation' +15
Talking about his accomplishment, Mee said: 'Skating across the lake posed [lots of] unique difficulties. I was nervous it couldn’t be done. I wasn’t sure if the surface of the lake would be smooth enough to accommodate skating. But this method actually proved to be something of a revelation'

Rio Tinto pays biggest divvy in history as profit hits three-year high www.mining.com

Rio Tinto (ASX, LON, NYSE:RIO), the world’s No.2 mining company, showed investors Wednesday how well it has ridden the wave of higher commodity prices by announcing a record dividend on the back of a big surge in annual profit and its cost cutting drive.

The company, which admitted is hunting for acquisitions, including in new commodities such as lithium, handed shareholders $1.80 per stock, taking its payout for 2017 to $2.90. The figure is the highest in Rio’s history and almost 71% more than the one it paid last year. As a result, cash returns to investors for 2017 totalled $9.7 billion.

Net profit for the year rose 90% (you read that right) to $8.8 billion, compared to the $4.6bn recorded in 2016. Underlying net profit after tax, in turn, was $8.62bn, up from $5.1bn in 2016, slightly ahead of market forecasts. Analysts expected the company to report $8.5bn.

Rio's largest division, iron ore, delivered the lion's share of revenue, as prices have recovered and remained relatively stable — trading around $75 a tonne — in the past year.

The record results are the first annual report for chief executive Jean-Sébastien Jacques, who took over from former boss Sam Walsh in July 2016.

Under Jacques, Rio has focused on cutting costs, generating cash and returning as much of it as possible to investors through dividends and share buybacks.

"I'm very proud of what the team has achieved. Biggest dividend ever in the 125-year history of the company and we believe that we’ll be able to generate a lot of cash again this year,”Jacques told reporters on an earnings call.

With net debt below $4 billion, Rio Tinto is once again in a position to look for fresh opportunities and projects. But analysts, including Investec’s mining expert Hunter Hillcoat, believe Rio is unlikely to embark on any “multibillion-dollar expansions” to chase mergers and acquisitions or pay a premium for other commodities, such as copper, given the industry’s history of overspending.

“The only way to rebalance their portfolio is to take on additional growth in other commodities like copper, either through acquisitions where they’ll have to pay a premium or through expansion, but they don’t really have too many meaningful growth options there,” Hillcoat told Bloomberg News.

Tainted reputation
Despite the positive results, the company is still battling reputational damage brought by a series of incidents, including a probe into a questionable payment made to an external consultant over the Simandou iron ore project in Guinea.

It is also facing fraud charges from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the country’s top securities regulator, related to the miner's and two former executive’s alleged covered-up of multi-billion-dollar losses on a coal investment in Mozambique, allegations which the two men and the company deny.

Rio has also been recently accused of dodging $700 million in taxes at its massive Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold mine in Mongolia.

Government approves cashmere program www.news.mn

The Mongolian government has approved a new cashmere programme to be implemented in two stages over four years. It will help keep the exisiting 5500 jobs in the cashmere sector and to create over 3600 new ones. Regarding the manufacturing capacity of fully processed cashmere, this will be increased final by 5.7 times.

Mongolia not issuing Chinese bond www.news.mn

There has been news in social media that the Government of Mongolia intends to issue a ‘Panda’ bond of CHY 800 million on the Chinese market. The news source said that Mongolian Government is discussing issuing a five year bond three months after it successfully raised the ‘Gerege’ bond.

Government to support companies for using recycled water www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. Minister of Environment, Green Development and Tourism of Mongolia N.Tserenbat held a meeting with companies that introduced efficient water utilization technologies to hear their opinions and initiatives and to present the ministry's works in this field.

Mongolia lawmakers to consider strict immigration cap www.reuters.com

ULAANBAATAR (Reuters) - Mongolian lawmakers have proposed a new immigration cap, looking to protect domestic workers, even as citizens increasingly seek opportunities abroad.

Mining essential to human progress – Rio Tinto www.m.engineeringnews.co.za

CAPE TOWN (miningweekly.com) – The images of large yellow mine trucks flashed across the big screen at this year’s Mining Indaba looked pretty ordinary. But that misperception was quickly cut short when Rio Tinto CE Energy and Minerals Bold Baatar told the full-house audience: "What you're watching are robots on wheels. They’re fully automated driverless trucks,” he said, adding their unassuming emergence beat the current obsession with driverless cars by a good decade, illustrating once again that mining has led human progress for millions of years.

“Since the time of our ancestors here in Africa, the Cradle of Humankind, three-and-a-half million years ago, human progress has been interlinked with mining,” Baatar emphasised.

What’s more, the oldest known mine, which is some 43 000 years of age, is located in neighbouring Swaziland, where ancestors of the San people mined red pigment for rock painting, and in East Africa, people produced steel more than 2 500 years ago, a development that only took place in Europe in the 1700s.

“So, mining has been essential to human progress since the dawn of time,” Mongolian-born Baatar told the Mining Indaba, which is being attended by Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly Online.

Mining is understood to be an economic bedrock in countries like Chile and Australia, underpinning gross domestic product and tax revenues, and Africa has its own success stories like Botswana, which was one of the poorest countries 50 years ago and now has a mining-linked sovereign wealth fund that benefits education, infrastructure and future generations.

“So, mining can be inclusive and bring on the sustainable development to the host communities in countries that change,” he said.

Common attributes of successful governments are good governance, good resource management and the rule of law.

“However, a key element that can make a difference for mining companies is the level of transparency, accountability, understanding and trust that are required for the partners to thrive,” he said.

“But the challenge is the mining sector is misunderstood where expectations are misaligned.”

He outlined how mining was made up of artisanal miners, who had a role to play, but who brought with them certain consequences; entrepreneurs, who pursued high-risk investment in the short-term; junior minor companies, which had the role of funding and discovering resources; and then the operator mining companies, which were small to large and brought on the operations.

If any of these participants did not behave responsibly, it cast a dark cloud over the whole sector.

For Rio Tinto, the key challenge was the misalignment of expectations, particularly around mineral wealth.

A common cause of misalignment was the calculation of the scale of mineral wealth by multiplying the resource size by the current mineral price.

Using copper as an example, a one-million-tonne resource multiplied by $7 000 becomes referred to as a $7-billion mineral resource.

The flaw of such analysis was that the investment and the costs are completely ignored in the equation.

Using $2-billion as the upfront investment, $1-billion paid in taxes, another $2-billion of operating expenses etcetera, left investors with $2-billion with which to cover debt interest and shareholder returns, which inflation would lower still further.

What should also be kept in mind was that the entire mine ecosystem of supply chain and mining services multiplied economic activity fourfold, with mining services generating more employment than mining itself.

It was important to maximise the local content of the supply chain, which was also a significant source of taxation revenue.

“It is not uncommon for the operators like us to see a very limited return on capital for a number of years,” Baatar calculated.

Returning to the driverless trucks, assuming each carried 250 t of material at the industry-average copper grade of 1%, that material would result in a mere 2.5 t of copper, with 99% of the material carried by the truck – some 247.5 t – having no mineral wealth in it whatsoever.

But the 250 t also has to be crushed and ground into a fine dust that was at times more refined than flour.

Then the copper was separated out of that through flotation, a bubble process not dissimilar from the brewing process.

There is more regrinding, dewatering and thickening and only after the smelting process, does the operating mining company end up with the 2.5 t of copper concentrate.

“So, we go from a massive large truck full to a little two-and-a-half tonnes of copper through a lot of hard work and energy usage,” he said, adding that his simplified example highlighted the central truth about mining: “It costs a lot of money to extract minerals, involves significant financial and execution risk and it is technically difficult work, particularly when done responsibly.” 

EDITED BY: Creamer Media Reporter

FM Talks between DPRK and Mongolia Held www.oananews.org

Pyongyang, February 6 (KCNA) -- Talks between DPRK Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho and Mongolian Foreign Minister D. Tsogtbaatar were held at the Mansudae Assembly Hall on Monday.
At the talks both sides exchanged views on the issue of continuing to develop the long-standing friendly and cooperative relations between the two countries in several fields and the issues of mutual concern and reached a consensus.
The DPRK foreign minister stressed the need to continue to develop the traditional relations of friendship and cooperation between the two countries forged and developed by President Kim Il Sung and leader Kim Jong Il with the preceding leaders of Mongolia irrespective of the changing situation.
The Mongolian foreign minister, saying that this year serves as an important occasion in developing the bilateral relations as it marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries, underlined the need to develop on good terms the Mongolia-DPRK relations of friendship with a long history and tradition. -0-

Cryptocurrency market loses over half a trillion dollars this year www.rt.com

The biggest sell-off in cryptocurrency market history has wiped out around $550 billion since January 7, when the market capitalization reached a record $836 billion.

Wheat incentive determined at MNT 50-60 thousand per ton www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/ The Cabinet on February 6 resolved to determine incentive for wheat supplied to domestic flour factories, Crop Farming Support Fund and government reserve.