Recent pollution in Beijing has been literally off the charts: while the Air Quality Index (AQI) goes from 1 to 500, the the reading in the city was hovering around 755 points, and reportedly in some districts it even went to nearly 900. By comparison, Los Angeles and New York rarely hit over 100 points. The situation has been compared to London’s “killer smog” of 1952, when pollution smothered 4,000 Londoners to death. Beijing resident Andrea Park took this photo of the gray haze in the trees outside her apartment. A man wearing a gas mask is visible in the foreground.