CAMPO FELICE Boyd Gordon Oilers Jersey , Italy — A helicopter ferrying an injured skier off the slopes slammed into a mountainside in central Italy Tuesday, killing all six people aboard in a new tragedy to hit a region already hobbled by a series of earthquakes, paralyzing snowfall and a deadly avalanche.
Some of the dead had recently been helping out with the recovery effort from the nearby Jan. 18 avalanche, colleagues said.
The helicopter smashed to pieces in the snow upon impact, with only the tail propellers and rear section still intact. Rescue crews brought the bodies down in sleds to waiting vehicles.
Visibility at the time was only about 20 meters (yards) "and with the snow conditions visibility was practically nothing," said Marshall Paolo Passalacqua, of the financial police's Alpine division. "We had a really hard time trying to find the wreckage."
He confirmed five crew members plus the injured skier had perished.
The helicopter was taking the injured skier from the Campo Felice ski area to L'Aquila, the regional capital about 15 kilometers (10 miles) away.
"They were very good pilots," said Americo Scarsella, a doctor and colleague of the crew. "Clearly what happened was not foreseeable."
The mayor of nearby Lucoli, Gianluca Marrocchi, said he had seen the helicopter and wondered why it was flying so low.
"After that it disappeared in the fog," he told RAI state TV.
The area is in Abruzzo's mountains, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) southwest from where emergency crews have been working around the clock to recover victims of the powerful Jan. 18 avalanche that crushed a luxury resort.
Tuesday's crash was not related to the avalanche, though the mountain rescue crew members involved had been helping with the recovery effort up until Monday, Adriano Favre of the Alpine rescue service, told RAI.
BEIJING, Oct. 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese railways set a new record in daily passenger traffic as more than 15 million trips were made on National Day, the first day of an eight-day holiday, China Railway Corporation said Monday.
The 15 million trips were up 4.2 percent from 14.4 million trips made on the National Day last year, the previous record, the company said.
The National Day holiday has been extended to eight days this year to celebrate Mid-Autumn, or Moon Cake Festival, that falls on Oct. 4.
The company expects another 12 million trips to be made on Monday.
On Saturday, the railway network transported 12.5 million people, up 9.8 percent year on year.
The company forecast that railways nationwide will receive around 130 million passengers in the 11 days following Sept. 28.
NAIROBI, Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- A book will be published on a Xinhua-produced documentary, which made enormous success by telling the stories of ordinary Kenyan and Chinese builders of Kenya's landmark railway.
Xinhua News Agency and Enjoy Culture & Media Co., Ltd. signed an agreement in Kenya on Thursday on the publication of "My Railway, My Story," which is based on the documentary depicting the construction of the Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR).
Representatives of Xinhua's Africa Regional Bureau and Enjoy, a subsidiary of Changjiang Publishing & Media, headquartered in China's Wuhan, inked the document at the Nairobi Terminus of the Mombasa-Nairobi SGR.
The book, which will appear in Chinese, English, and French editions, will be largely based on the 90-minute eponymous documentary, which tells behind-the-scene stories from the perspective of ordinary Chinese and Kenyan builders of the SGR, the largest infrastructure project since Kenya's independence.
A flagship project of China-Kenyan cooperation, the 480-km line has been providing daily passenger services between the Kenyan capital and the port city of Mombasa since its inauguration on June 1.
The making of the three-episode documentary took the Xinhua team and its partners more than two years for field interviewing and post production, with raw footage totaling over 200 hours.
The first two episodes of the documentary, "Bridges" and "Stations," were first screened on Kenya's major public broadcaster KBC, attracting an estimated 30 million viewers in five days after debut in late May, according to KBC statistics.
The third episode of the documentary, "Roads," came out after the inauguration of the Mombasa-Nairobi SGR.
The documentary, initially in English and later rendered into Chinese, French, and Swahili, has since also appeared on TV stations of China, Nigeria and Zambia, and was made available online and on social media platforms.
Wu Zhiqiang, deputy director-general of Xinhua Africa, hailed the book deal as a good start for the two sides' coop. Cheap Jerseys China Cheap Jerseys China Cheap Soccer Jerseys Cheap Jerseys From China Cheap Football Jerseys Cheap Jerseys China Cheap Jerseys From China Cheap New Jerseys Cheap Womens Jerseys Wholesale NHL Jerseys
