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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Wednesday was a weak 58-79-127. The TSX Venture Exchange fell one point to 776 while polished diamond prices were flat. Tom Hodgson's Lithium Americas Corp. (LAC) dropped one cent to $1.73 on 2.46 million shares. The company, which has an advanced lithium brine project, Cauchari-Olaroz, in northern Argentina, has been quiet for over a month.

Lukas Lundin and Dr. William Lamb's Lucara Diamond Corp. (LUC), up two cents to $2.40 on 443,000 shares, has completed two important upgrades to its processing plant at Karowe, its rich diamond mine in Botswana. The first upgrade was what it called a "Mega diamond recovery" (MDR) circuit that will handle broken chunks of kimberlite ranging from 50 millimetres to 120 millimetres in diameter. The MDR circuit, which carried a projected cost of up to $18-million (U.S.), is located immediately after the primary crusher and before the main processing plant. It is designed to capture diamonds weighing over 200 carats and ideally over 1,000 carats, such as the 3,106-carat Cullinan, the world's largest diamond ever recovered, which was about 100 millimetres in length.

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