China’s monster traffic jam has reared its head again, with trucks and cars backed up for up to 30km yesterday on a highway north of Beijing, although that is a third the size it had been.
The traffic jam came four days after the break-up of an even bigger one — stretching to 100km at one point.
State media said the latest jam on the Beijing-Tibet highway was caused by an accident and road maintenance.
The worst of the jam started in Zhangjiakou, a city about 150km northwest of Beijing, and stretched into Inner Mongolia in northern China, with traffic creeping along in fits and starts.
A woman who answered the phone at the Beijing traffic management office said drivers should not take the highway.
“The traffic flow is very slow,” said the woman, who refused to give her name.
Traffic jams are part of daily life in China’s major cities, with vehicles moving at a crawl in parts of Beijing for most of the day.
In the previous traffic jam on the Beijing-Tibet highway, which started on Aug. 14 and lasted about 10 days, state media said some drivers were stuck for five days with those on the worst-hit stretches passing the time sitting in the shade of their immobilized trucks, playing cards, sleeping on the asphalt or bargaining with price-gouging food vendors.
A bottle of water was selling for 10 yuan (US$1.50), 10 times the normal price, Chinese media reports said.
The main reason traffic has increased on the highway, which is four lanes in places, is the opening of coal mines in the northwest, vital for the booming economy, which this month surpassed Japan’s in size and is now second only to the US.
Officials eased the first jam by directing truckers to take a 300km detour, the China Daily said.
It quoted one truck driver, Lu Yong, who was stuck in both jams, as saying he should have prepared some food this time.
“Who knows when the traffic will move again?” said the 37-year-old, who was stranded for two nights in the last jam at almost the same location.
A woman at the Inner Mongolian traffic management office said it may take several days to ease the latest jam.
“Please do not drive on this expressway,” said the official, who also would not give her name.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS