Iron ore price slumps to three-week low on weak China demand, strong global supply
Property investment in China fell 10.1% in the first half of 2024 from a year earlier.
Al Jazeera reports that metal theft in England is widespread, and a British railway authority says that metal theft has cost them milllions.
Pictured is what is left of a statue by Barabara Hepworth, a British sculpture who was a contemporary of Henry Moore. Her statue, Two Forms (Divided Circle), was taken from Dulwich Park, South London on Dec. 20. The statue had sat in the park for over 40 years.
Theives target electricity cables, railway lines, electricity poles, church roofs to get the lead, statues of famous figures and even plaques honouring the war dead.
Graham Tope, a Liberal Democrat politician in the United Kingdom, tells Al Jazeera that the metal thefts are a sign of moral collapse.
“In the 1930s we had real poverty in this country, much worse than we have now, and we didn’t have this type of behaviour then,” says Tope.
A special police forces has been set up in England to tackle the problem.
The British Transport Police told the BBC that over £13m of property was stolen from railways over the last 3 1/2 years, and the transportation authority is urging scrap dealers to carefully review the materials they accept for recycling.
In 2008 the State of California passed regulations requiring documentation before any item is sold to a metal dealer, including a signed statement that the item being sold to the metal dealer is actually owned by the seller. The seller must also provide ID and a thumb print, and the seller must wait three days before receiving payment for some types of metal.
