Welcome back to your weekly mining news recap. We hope you all enjoyed your long weekend! Each week we’ll catch you up on the industry news from CIM Magazine and elsewhere that you may have missed. In these week’s headlines: Vale’s going all-electric at Creighton, AngloGold announces massive job cuts in South Africa, and First Quantum steps away from its proposed deal with Northern Dynasty.

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On its Instagram story this weekend, Kensington Palace confirmed that Meghan Markle’s wedding ring was made from a piece of Welsh gold gifted to her by the Queen. Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, wed Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, on Saturday at Windsor Castle. The gold nugget the ring came from could be from one of two mines in the Welsh Dolgellau belt – Gwynfynydd, or the more prolific Clogau-St. David’s mine. (What? This is mining news!)

No suitors have stepped forward to express interest in taking over the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion as Kinder Morgan’s May 31 deadline for abandoning the project looms. As the Canadian Press reported Wednesday, analysts and observers are “perplexed” by Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s assertion that “plenty of investors” would want to take on the project, when Kinder Morgan owns the original pipeline.

Also on Wednesday, AngloGold Ashanti said it plans to cut 2,000 jobs at its domestic operations in South Africa in order to cut costs. The company currently employs around 8,200 people in the country. AngloGold said the cuts will affect “employees across the different categories and levels, including the region’s executive committee and senior management.”

The first all-female mine rescue team, the Diamonds in the Rough, is fundraising to attend the International Mines Rescue Competition in Russia in late September. Every member of the eight-person mine rescue team, and one of the two coaches, is a woman – a first-ever in the competition’s history. The team has a GoFundMe page, and team captain Kari Lentowicz told us that she expects the team will need to raise $84,000 to train and attend the competition.

Sherritt International completed a successful pilot test of a process that could be a game-changer for Alberta’s oil sands producers, we reported today. The company is testing a bitumen-upgrading process that could effectively eliminate the need for diluent, a high-cost thinning solution used in transporting oil.

Northern Dynasty shares lost as much as a third of their value in early trading this morning after First Quantum stepped back from a proposed deal that would see the company acquiring 50 per cent of Northern Dynasty’s Pebble project. Northern Dynasty has been looking for a partner on the controversial Alaska project since 2013.

Vale is transitioning its Creighton deep zone to an electric vehicle fleet, and designing its future greenfield operations to be all-electric, we reported today. Vehicles in Creighton’s deep zone will be replaced with electric vehicles as they reach their end of life, which will begin this year with an explosives loader and three personnel carriers. Vale told us that next year it will have 11 new vehicles being brought into operation underground.