New York spot gold fell $22.60 Wednesday, closing at $2,296.90. The TSX Venture Exchange rose 1.01 points to 565.58 while the TSX gold index added 1.84 points to 315.87. Victoria Gold Corp. (VGCX), which crashed $6.07 to $1.36 on 15.2 million shares yesterday, stabilized today, ending the day down eight cents to $1.28 on 10.34 million shares. The stock's collapse followed a failure in the leach pad at Victoria's Eagle mine in Yukon. First Quantum Minerals Ltd. (FM) was strong today, as it added $1.35 to $19.64 on 4.69 million shares. Michael Durose's Lavras Gold Corp. (LGC) was buoyant on good news. It added 47 cents to $2.07 on 409,000 shares on word it has drilled a 236-metre interval grading 1.4 grams of gold. The hit started from surface at the Butia deposit, on the western edge of the LDS project in southern Brazil. A 74-metre midsection had the best grade, with 2.5 grams of gold per tonne. A second of the seven new holes also did well, with a 228-metre surface-based interval averaging one gram per tonne -- again with a 60-metre midsection running 2.3 grams per to |