Morning markets: Commodity price gains boost miners

The mining sector continued yesterday's advance on the back of rising prices for copper, lead, nickel and tin. Petropavlovsk, the miner that recently hired ex-BlackRock manager Graham Birch as a non-executive director, was up 4.3% at 995p. Eurasian Natural Resources rose 3% to 995.5p. Hedge fund Man Group also rose, by 5.3% to 239.9p, after it successfully placed €600m of five-year notes. Companies that were ex-dividend peppered the list of UK fallers. BP and Scottish & Southern Energy, each in this category, fell by 1.4% and 1.3% respectively. In the US, the Dow closed up...