The smog has become so thick in Beijing that the city’s natural light-starved masses have begun flocking to huge digital commercial television screens across the city to observe virtual sunrises.

The futuristic screens installed in the Chinese capital usually advertize tourist destinations, but as the season’s first wave of extremely dangerous smog hit – residents donned air masks and left their homes to watch the only place where the sun would hail over the horizon that morning.

Commuters across Beijing found themselves cloaked in a thick, gray haze on Thursday as air pollution monitors issued a severe air warning and ordered the elderly and school children to stay indoors until the quality improved.

But the readings early Thursday for particles of PM2.5 pollution marked the first ones of the season above 500 micrograms per cubic meter.

Beijing authorities said the haze on Thursday had reduced the visibility to several hundred meters (yards) and that the severe pollution was likely to continue through Friday.

A level above 300 is considered hazardous, while the World Health Organization recommends a daily level of no more than 20.

Thieves have tried to steal the ashes of Sigmund Freud and his wife.

They broke an ancient Greek urn that contained the couple’s remains after breaking into a cemetery in Golders Green, north London.

The ‘irreplaceable’ urn, which was a gift to the founding father of psychoanalysis from Princess Marie Bonaparte, the great-grandniece of Napoleon, was ‘severely damaged’. The would-be thieves left empty-handed.

The urn was placed in the crematorium following Freud’s death in Hampstead in September 1939.

The ashes of his wife, Martha, were added to the urn when she died in 1951, aged 90.

A spokesman for the crematorium said the urn, which was ‘severely damaged’, has since been moved to a secure location and that security was now under review.

The crematorium in Hoop Lane has been the scene for the funerals of many British celebrities, including authors Bram Stoker, Enid Blyton and more recently Amy Winehouse and Peter Sellers.

Conflicts like the war in Syria and getting the world economy back on track will be the focus of next week’s gathering of world leaders and power brokers in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.

Organizers of the World Economic Forum say hundreds of public figures are expected to attend including Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, Myanmar’s President Thein Sein and British Prime Minister David Cameron.

The forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, told reporters Wednesday the event seeks to “push the reset button” on the world’s crisis mode. He expects there to be “cautious optimism” among the attendees, but also realistic expectations about what could be achieved.