1. Lipstick in Pleasure Me Red

Weir has walked away from a £260m takeover battle for the Australian mining equipment maker Ludowici after being repeatedly outbid by a Danish rival, FLSmidth.

Voters go to the polls today in the oil-rich Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan in elections that are expected to slightly broaden democratic representation in parliament's rubber-stamp lower house.

Israel would like the salt lake to be declared a wonder of nature. But years of neglect and exploitation mean it is shrinking before our eyes, Donald Macintyre reports from Ein Gedi

It has now been a week since the announcement by the Australian government of sweeping plans to curb carbon emissions, with Canberra unveiling a levy on the country's biggest polluters. The continent boasts a vast mining industry, and the news has been met with disappointment among industry groups. Some big- name miners also weighed in, agreeing with the principle of tackling climate change, but not so receptive to the idea of the planned tax on their operations.

China's dominance of the production of rare-earth metals, which are used in everything from iPods and flat-screen TVs to missiles, could soon be at an end after Japanese researchers said they had found massive deposits of the minerals on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

Mohamed al Fayed today vowed to take Surrey County Council to court if plans to extend a sand quarry on greenbelt land are successful.

The United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) appears to have disgraced itself once again. In 2004 the reputation of peacekeepers in the country was blackened by reports of UN soldiers sexually exploiting underage local girls. And this week it emerged that UN forces did nothing while as many as 150 civilians – including babies – were raped and assaulted by rebels just 19 miles from their base in the east of the country.

Craig Smith is to step down as the chief financial officer of African Minerals, an Aim-listed miner which struck a $1.5bn investment deal with China last month.

To succeed at insider dealing – not that we condone it, mind – you need someone to whom you have no obvious link to trade on the secret information you're supplying. This seemed to slip the mind of Jeremy Burley, the managing director of BMS Minerals, a Ugandan company that supplied equipment to the UK's Tower Resources. When he discovered Tower was about to announce a setback on one of its oil fields, Mr Burley told his contact back home to sell his considerable shareholding in the company. They were caught – and fined yesterday by the Financial Services Authority – possibly because the pair were just a little bit linked: Mr Burley's UK share trader was one Jeffery Burley, his dear old dad.

African Minerals, the mining group with assets in West Africa, has signed a deal with a Chinese steel-maker for a $1.5bn (£989m) investment that will help to develop what its controversial chairman, Frank Timis, says could be the biggest iron ore mine in the world.

The French certification company Bureau Veritas is to buy the British commodities testing and inspection company Inspectorate for £450m in a deal that it predicts will boost its earnings from this year.