From The Times:

THE citizens of China’s capital are fiercely proud that it will host the Olympics in 2008, but massive rebuilding, smog, appalling traffic and rising living costs are fraying their nerves.

The latest incident to beset Beijingers was a huge hole ” 20m (65ft) long, 10m wide and 10m deep ” in a busy section of one of the ring roads encircling the city of 14 million.

“Filthy water leaked out of the pipe and poured into a section of the subway line that is under construction,” was how the Beijing Evening News reported the hole, which opened just a week after a burst water pipe caused the road to sink in the southern district of Xuanwu.