A heavy fog shrouding Shanghai caused widespread flight cancellations after the worst pollution levels since Chinese government monitoring prompted the city to order vehicles off the road and factories to cut production.
The city’s air quality index jumped to 503 by 2pm yesterday, putting it in the “beyond index” category, the US consulate in Shanghai said on its Web site. Pollution is hazardous and people should take steps to reduce their exposure by staying indoors in a room or building with filtered air, it said. Visibility was as low as 600m in some parts of the city according to a government weather Web site.
“The pollution is worse today [yesterday] and the fog is getting heavier,” said Zhang Yanbing (張彥斌), an analyst at Zheshang Securities Co in Shanghai. “I am not prohibiting my kids from going outside because we have to learn to grow up in all kinds of environments. But they are definitely wearing face masks.”
Heavy pollution may undermine plans for Shanghai, the nation’s commercial hub, to attract foreign investment and multinational firms, as the city implements a free-trade zone as part of a broader goal to become a global financial and logistics center by 2020.
The Shanghai government said the air quality reading surged to 458 as of 2:55pm, placing it in the “severe” category, the highest in a six-tier rating system, according to its own monitoring.
Yesterday the air quality level surpassed the previous record of 317, the Shanghai Daily reported. Local authorities warned children and elderly people to stay indoors.
Shanghai took emergency steps against pollution yesterday, ordering 30 percent of government-used vehicles off the road and industrial companies to reduce or halt production, the city said on its microblog.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
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
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS