Welcome back to your weekly mining news recap. At the end of the week, we’ll catch you up on the mining news from CIM Magazine and elsewhere you may have missed. In this week’s headlines: Paulson successfully ousts the majority of Detour Gold’s board and its interim CEO, De Beers considers a completely renewable-powered Chidliak, and Hudbay has a proxy battle on its hands.

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New Gold laid off five of its senior management workers on Monday, when it eliminated the treasury and technology, planning and advisory, projects, reporting, and tax and exploration vice-presidents. The company said it will also hire in the near future for the newly created position of vice president of technical services. The changes came in response to New Gold having fewer assets under its control, after selling off its Mesquite and Peak mines this year.

Also on Monday, PDAC named Lisa McDonald its new executive director. No stranger to the organization, McDonald has been involved with PDAC for 20 years, including as COO for 10 years and interim executive director for the past year. She has also played a key role in the expansion of the PDAC convention in Toronto, a well-known mineral exploration and mining event.

De Beers Canada is mulling making its newly acquired Chidliak project a completely renewable energy-powered mine. CEO Kim Truter said at the Energy and Mines World Congress that making Chidliak, which is located 120 kilometres northeast of Iqaluit on Baffin Island, a 100 per cent renewable mine would require a complete re-think in mine planning. The company is considering “radical solutions” like eliminating the use of haul trucks and not building an access road from the territory’s capital city.

Workers at Codelco’s Chuquicamata mine in Chile stopped working on Wednesday to protest the company’s plans to lay off 1,700 workers as it transitions to an underground operation. The three unions involved are also concerned with healthcare provisions, and claim their agreement with the mine has been violated and that union leaders were being threatened. According to a spokesperson for the Chuquicamata, operations at the mine are still running smoothly.

Billionaire John Paulson’s proxy battle against Detour Gold ended Thursday with the ousting of five of the company’s eight board members – including chair Alex Morrison – and interim CEO Michael Kenyon’s resignation. The battle began in July, with the Paulson-run hedge fund demanding that the entire Detour board be replaced. Paulson & Co. Inc. complained it had invested $280 million in equity and $250 million in debt financing in the last ten years and had seen only poor returns.

Speaking of proxy battles, Hudbay Minerals’ activist shareholder Waterton Global Resource Management announced its intention to put forward a majority slate of directors for election to Hudbay’s board in May, and a candidate for CEO. In a marked escalation of the companies’ spat, Waterton, which now owns 10 per cent of Hudbay’s shares, accused the company of showing a “pattern of systemic bad faith and lack of engagement with shareholders,” and said board chair Alan Hibben has a “troubling” level of influence over the company. Hudbay responded to Waterton’s letter to shareholders on Thursday evening, saying it was “disappointed with Waterton’s personal attacks on certain of the company’s leadership, its selective use of performance metrics and its revisionist history regarding its confrontational approach to date.”

Two workers at Alamos Gold’s Mulatos mine in Mexico are “presumed dead” after a serious accident on Thursday. Alamos said there was an “unexpected pit slope movement” in the area of the mine where the company has been conducting pre-stripping activities. A search and rescue operation for the missing workers is currently underway, and Alamos said it had contacted authorities and reached out to the employees’ families.

A new report from PwC revealed that at mid-year 2018, juniors were flush with cash but spending it more carefully on exploration efforts – and given the market’s turn for the worse in the second half of this year, it was a prudent decision. We reached out to PwC Canada’s national mining lead Dean Braunsteiner about the report’s findings, the increasing use of tech to make exploration dollars go further, and what juniors might expect in 2019.

North American Palladium and Redpath signed a two-year contract for underground mine development at NAP’s Lac Des Iles mine. The expansion is expected to double the mine’s output, from its current rate of 6,000 tonnes per day (tpd) to 12,000 tpd, which would make it “one of the largest underground mines in Canada,” according to NAP president and CEO Jim Gallagher.

In the “ooh, shiny!” department, the largest diamond ever found in North America was discovered at Dominion Diamond Mines and Rio Tinto’s shared Diavik mine in the Northwest Territories. The yellow diamond, nearly three times the size of the second-largest diamond found in Canada and reportedly about the size of a chicken-egg, is a whopping 552 carats. There’s no word yet on how much money a stone like that would fetch on the market.

If you want to do some weekend reading, check out our feature on customized comminution, which explores the use of simulations in selecting efficient mill liners.

We’ve also released our end-of-year lists. Check out our editors’ favourite reads of 2018, and the top 10 most-read stories of the year.