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China: World’s largest indoor ski resort opens in Shanghai
The massive facility using artificial snow and cooling machines is modeled like a glacier and opened fully to customers, after lengthy delays, on Friday. China’s northern natural pistes are shrinking amid climate change.
The facility has four separate slopes and an array of other rides, with a cable car, chairlifts and trains ferrying people to the summits
© Hector Retamal/AFP
Shanghai opened the world’s largest indoor ski resort on Friday amid searing temperatures outside as China reported its hottest August in 60 years.
Temperatures were already at 30 degrees Celsius (roughly 86 Fahrenheit) by 9 a.m. during Friday’s outdoor opening ceremony in a mock Alpine square, but were closer to freezing point inside the building.
The building has a skiing area of 90,000 square meters or 9 hectares. Incorporating other facilities likes shops, hotels, and a still-unopened water park the construction area extends to 350,000 square meters.
The vast resort is one of many large expensive projects developed in recent decades in Shanghai’s once sparsely-populated Pudong district
© CFOTO/picture alliance
The festivities marked the end of a difficult teething and test period for the facility. Chinese state media reported that safety procedures were being reviewed after an incident on Wednesday, when limited numbers of people were already allowed in, in which a patron’s finger was severed by another skier.
Industry expansion amid Winter Olympics
Years in the making, once scheduled to open in 2019 according to Chinese media, the vast resort is part of a state-supported winter sports investment drive rooted partly in the country hosting the last Winter Olympics in 2022 and also in a more general bid to cater to the recreational wishes of an expanding middle class.
The Guinness Book of Records certified the facility as the largest of its kind in the world on opening day, surpassing another giant Chinese facility in Harbin
© Hector Retamal/AFP
Located in Shanghai’s Pudong district, the L*SNOW Indoor Skiing Theme Resort was certified by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest on its opening day on Friday. It overtakes another Chinese facility in northern Harbin.
China has developed several such indoor resorts in recent years and boasts five of the 10 largest by skiing area in the world, according to Daxue Consulting. China’s CCTV reported that some 360 million people in the country do winter sports.
The construction coincides with retreating and less reliable snow slopes in the traditional skiing resorts in the north of the country amid climate change, a tale familiar to European skiiers visiting mountain ranges like the Alps.
“In China, it might have more of an effect in the north because of climate change, there are fewer people doing winter sports there,” 48-year-old skier Zhang Jin told the AFP news agency. “So some of the snow parks just aren’t operating well, they’re shrinking. Instead, it’s this kind of thing opening up right now, larger indoor ones, which I think is still pretty good.”
Solar panels on roof to offset ‘inevitably’ consuming ‘a lot’ of energy
The center uses artifical snow, rather than the oft-maligned dry ski slopes that may not provide as authentic an experience for enthusiasts but that can operate in any weather all year round.
Officials said that it uses 72 cooling machines to maitain an indoor temperature around freezing point, and 33 snow-making machines to feed the pistes.
A Shanghai government report in August acknowledged that such projects “will inevitably consume a lot of energy.” But it also said the resort was built to maximize energy reuse where possible, for instance via ice storage and waste-heat recovery systems.
Three-quarters of the building’s roof is covered with solar photovoltaic panels to help power it.
“We have taken a lot of energy-saving measures,” resort executive Yin Kang told AFP.
Chinese state media reported that the steepest slope had a 26 degree gradient, and the longest s-bend course extended for 460 meters (around 500 yards)
© Hector Retamal/AFP
A TV chef who fled to London after his opposition of Vladimir Putoin has been found dead while on a promotional tour
A Russian TV chef who criticised Vladimir Putin has been found dead in a Belgrade hotel
Alexei Zimin, 52, died suddenly on a promotional tour to the Serbian capital. Authorities have said his cause of death is currently “unclear”.
Zimin fled Russia to London after his oppositions of Putin. Zimin was once a popular figure on Russian cooking shows. He also owned Zima restaurant in Soho, which he founded after he had left Russia following Putin’s invasion of Crimea.
In a statement released by Zima magazine today, a spokesperson said: “Alexei Zimin, the project’s editor-in-chief and the chef of the Zima restaurant, has passed away. Alexei was not only a colleague, he was our friend, a close person with whom we were lucky to go through a lot – both good, kind and sad.”
London-based exiled Russian TV chef, editor and restaurateur Alexei Zimin, dies at 52.
It concluded: “Thank you to everyone for the words we received today about Alexei. We are hurting together with you.”
Zimin had also been editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of GQ magazine.
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
CAIRO (Reuters) – Israeli military strikes killed at least 14 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, as Israeli forces deepened their incursion into Beit Hanoun town in the north, forcing most remaining residents to leave.
Residents said Israeli forces besieged shelters housing displaced families and the remaining population, which some estimated at a few thousand, ordering them to head south through a checkpoint separating two towns and a refugee camp in the north from Gaza City.
Men were held for questioning, while women and children were allowed to continue towards Gaza City, residents and Palestinian medics said.
Israel’s campaign in the north of Gaza, and the evacuation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the area, has fueled claims from Palestinians that it is clearing the area for use as a buffer zone and potentially for a return of Jewish settlers.
A Palestinian man inspects the site of an Israeli strike on a house in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip November 13, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
© Thomson Reuters
“The scenes of the 1948 catastrophe are being repeated. Israel is repeating its massacres, displacement and destruction,” said Saed, 48, a resident of Beit Lahiya, who arrived in Gaza City on Wednesday.
“North Gaza is being turned into a large buffer zone, Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing under the sight and hearing of the impotent world,” he told Reuters via a chat app.
Saed was referring to the 1948 Middle East Arab-Israeli war which gave birth to the state of Israel and saw the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their home towns and villages in what is now Israel.
NO PLANS FOR SETTLERS’ RETURN
The Israeli military has denied any such intention, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he does not want to reverse the 2005 withdrawal of settlers from Gaza. Hardliners in his government have talked openly about going back.
A Palestinian firefighter works to extinguish fire following an Israeli strike on tents of displaced people, in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip November 12, 2024. REUTERS/Ahmed Mustafa
© Thomson Reuters
It said forces have killed hundreds of Hamas militants in Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun during its new military offensive, which began more than a month ago. Hamas and the Islamic Jihad armed wing claimed killing several Israeli soldiers during ambushes and anti-tank rocket fire.
Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli strike on a house in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip November 13, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
© Thomson Reuters
On Tuesday, the United States stressed at the United Nations that “there must be no forcible displacement, nor policy of starvation in Gaza” by Israel, warning such policies would have grave implications under U.S. and international law.
Medics said five people were killed in an Israeli strike that hit a group of people outside Kamal Adwan Hospital near Beit Lahiya, while five others were killed in two separate strikes in Nuseirat in central Gaza Strip where the army began a limited raid two days ago.
In Rafah, near the border with Egypt, one man was killed and several others were wounded in an Israeli airstrike, while three Palestinians were killed in two separate Israeli airstrikes in Shejaia suburb of Gaza City, medics added.
Hamas-led gunmen attacked Israel last October, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
More than 43,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past year, Palestinian health officials say, and Gaza has been reduced to a wasteland of wrecked buildings and piles of rubble, where more than 2 million Gazans are seeking shelter in makeshift tents and facing shortages of food and medicines.
Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli strike on a house in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip November 13, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
© Thomson Reuters
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