Word: skies
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Anyone stepping outside in Beijing around midday on June 18 would have noticed something slightly amiss. The sky was dark enough for cars to use their headlights, and the air was as thick as a smoky bar just before last call. After one of the cleanest springs on record, the Chinese capital's air quality took an unhealthy plunge for the worse...
...Ahead of the Beijing Olympics last year environmental officials came under harsh criticism that they were tweaking pollution data to artificially raise the number of so-called "blue sky" days when emissions fall below official targets. American environmental consultant Steven Q. Andrews accused the government of switching to monitoring stations in lower pollution areas, changing the makeup of the air pollution index to focus on less prevalent pollutants, and reporting a disproportionately large number of days with pollution measurements just below the "blue sky" cutoff. Du Shaozhong, the deputy head of the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau, denied the allegations...
...past year, the proportion of days just under the "blue sky" cutoff has decreased in Beijing. Whether that's a sign that the numbers are more accurate, or merely better gamed, is still unclear. The city's hot, humid summers and occasional sandstorms mean that air quality can turn bad with surprising speed. Without real-time reporting, the official data are more a matter of historical interest. This afternoon the Ministry of Environmental Protection reported the air pollution index for the 24 hours ending at noon on Friday was 159, or "slightly polluted." That's still pretty...
...things that have changed in China over the past 30 years, transportation has undergone one of the most obvious of transformations. Where city streets once swarmed with bicycles, they are now full of automobiles. Cars clog intersection and expressways. Their exhaust clouds the sky and the air is full of the sound of horns. But zipping through the congestion is the vanguard of another transportation revolution: vehicles that use no gas, emit no exhaust and are so quiet they can surprise the unwary pedestrian...
...leading theories now is that malfunctioning sensors may have prevented the crew from correctly gauging the plane's velocity as it entered a turbulent zone. Traveling too fast in such conditions could have caused the A330 to break up; insufficient speed could have caused it to fall from the sky. (Read "What Brought Down Air France Flight...