You Mean It's Not Fog??
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| Really Bad |
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| Not As Bad |
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| Better |
Beijing air quality tops pollution index
Beijing(Reuters) - Air pollution in Beijing, under pressure to provide clear skies before the 2008 Olympics, reached the worst level on a government air quality index on Tuesday.
Beijing's air pollution was rated "hazardous" --the highest category in the China Environmental Monitoring Center's index-- for the 24-hour period ending at noon on Tuesday, Xinhua said.
Since the fog started late on Sunday, police have shut down parts of six highways near Beijing and a ring road on the outskirts of the city, Xinhua news agency said.
For a second consecutive day, Beijing was blanketed in heavy fog, which reduced visibility to a few hundred metres, and had delayed at least 80 flights, the official Xinhua news agency reported. [...]
[...] Beijing has pledged to cut air pollution in the lead-up to the Olympics but faces an uphill battle as its increasingly wealthy population rushes to buy exhaust-emitting cars. one out of every three days were classified as polluted in Beijing and 15 other major cities and had affected the "physical" and "psychological health" of some 15 million people, the State Environmental Protection Agency said on its Web site.
