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.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of
A prominent Christian leader has allegedly been stabbed at the altar during a Mass yesterday in southwest Sydney. Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was saying Mass at Christ The Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley just after 7pm when a man approached him at the altar and allegedly stabbed toward his head multiple times. A live stream of the Mass shows the congregation swarm forward toward Emmanuel before it was cut off. The church leader gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, amassing a large online following, Officers attached to Fairfield City police area command attended a location on Welcome Street, Wakeley following reports a number