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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Tuesday was a poor 35-70-146 as the TSX Venture Exchange fell 10 points to 652. Polished diamond prices fell 1 per cent. Indian diamond exporters are pushing for a temporary ban on rough diamond imports as the world economic situation worsens, a move they last took when prices for diamonds collapsed late in 2008. That news helped send Robert Gannicott's Dominion Diamond Corp. (DDC) down 62 cents to $17.20 on 769,000 shares. India is a significant consumer of rough produced at Dominion's Diavik and Ekati mines. Scott Nelson's Titanium Corp. Inc. (TIC) gained one cent to $1.46 on 51,000 shares. The company touts a plan to produce titanium and other metals from oil sands tailings as a way to "create value from waste." Titanium's chart indicates the pitch is working -- the stock soared to $1.55 from 70 cents over the past month.

Terry Tucker's Tango Mining Ltd. (TGV), up one-half cent to three cents on 359,000 shares, has begun bulk sampling its Oena diamond project on the Orange River in South Africa. Initial results are encouraging. The company has processed 12,200 tonnes of alluvial gravels and recovered 36.4 carats. That works out to a minuscule 0.30 carat per 100 tonnes, but the diamonds are likely to carry a hefty value. Tango's parcel contains just 12 stones, so the average stone weight is an impressive 3.03 carats. The largest gem so far weighed 11.5 carats. This initial result is substantially above the company's resource projection. Tango listed 2.8 million tonnes of gravel as an inferred resource across blocks 2-6 at Oena, at an average of 0.115 carat per tonne. Further, the average stone size was projected at 1.39 carat per tonne.

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