Heavy snow hit Beijing yesterday, stranding thousands of passengers at the Chinese capital’s main airport and casting an unusual quiet over normally busy streets as people stayed out of the freezing weather.
More than 80 percent of flights at Beijing’s Capital International Airport, the country’s busiest, were canceled or delayed, state TV said, with only one of its three runways open.
Airports in the nearby cities of Tianjin, Hohhot and Shijiazhuang closed completely, the report said.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Most of the highways out of Beijing were closed too, with several centimeters of snow blanketing roads and temperatures expected to touch lows of minus 14°C.
The city government mobilized almost 200 snow-clearing vehicles to keep traffic moving downtown, Xinhua news agency said, and upgraded the snowstorm alert from blue to yellow.
“The yellow alert means that the snowfall is going to turn heavier,” it quoted Guo Hu, Beijing’s chief meteorologist, as saying.
The snow is expected to stop falling in Beijing today, but temperatures are likely to drop further, with lows of around minus 20°C, forecasters said.
Beijing, which over the past few years has seen little winter snow, has experienced several falls so far this season, including at least one man-made snowstorm to help ease a prolonged drought.
The bad weather is also affecting large swathes of the rest of northern and northeastern China, with snow and plunging temperatures expected to continue into the first full week of the new year, according to weather forecasts.
The southwestern provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and the metropolis of Chongqing are expected to experience heavy fog, forecasters said.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
RSS