Chinese engineers have unveiled plans to build the world’s longest tunnel.

At 77 miles, the Dalian-Yantai tunnel on the country’s eastern coast will save travellers an eight-hour ferry ride or 900-mile road trip.

The £22billion project could start within a couple of years, with completion scheduled for 2026.

The world’s longest undersea tunnel, the Seikan in Japan, opened in 1988 after more than two decades of construction. The Channel tunnel is 31 miles long.

Engineers will submit a blueprint to the government by April for the tunnel and work could start as early as 2015 or 2016, the China Daily newspaper reported yesterday.

The tunnel will run from the port city of Dalian in northeastern Liaoning province to Yantai city in eastern Shandong, slashing travel time to 40 minutes.

At present, the journey between the cities is a 1,400-km (870 miles) drive or an eight-hour ferry ride, the China Daily said.

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Anti-government protesters clashed with police in Venezuela, leaving three people shot to death and nearly two dozen injured, authorities said.

Two people were killed in the capital of Caracas during the protests Wednesday, Venezuelan attorney general Luisa Ortega said.

Mayor Ramon Muchacho of Chacao, a municipality in greater Caracas, confirmed a third fatality on his Twitter account.

At least 23 people were injured, and government and private vehicles torched by protesters, Ortega told state-run Venezuelan news agency.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro described the recent protests as a possible coup against his government.

The interior minister said about 30 people were arrested for vandalism acts Wednesday.

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People around the world headed to the streets to celebrate the Chinese New Year, and to welcome the Year of the Horse.

Chinese New Year, which began on Friday, is the most important holiday in the country’s calendar with residents getting a week-long holiday. But this year celebrations were relatively low-key in China.

Chinese festivities normally begin with extravagant fireworks displays, which are believed to bring good luck and dispel evil spirits. However, as smog has blanketed parts of central and eastern China over the last few months, officials called on residents to buy fewer fireworks in order to lessen air pollution in the country.

Even the New Year galas, which are shown on state television, were reduced in scale in keeping with President Xi Jinping’s call for frugality, Reuters reported.

The holiday was also marked in cities around the world.

Sydney kicked off a week of festivities with a parade through the city’s centre attended by 100,000, according the City of Sydney Council.

The parade featured rocking horses, jockeys and a giant Trojan horse all moving to the sounds of pop song Horses, by Daryl Braithwaite. In keeping with the Year of the Horse celebrations, even the mounted police got a cheer from the crowd, according to AAP.

New York’s celebrations saw 5,000 participate in a parade through the streets of Chinatown. Magicians, acrobats, and dragon puppeteers spilled out into nearby streets.

The 15 victims simply couldn’t outrun the searing debris that billowed out of Indonesia’s Mount Sinabung.

Plumes of ash had spewed more than a mile into the sky Saturday and descended in superheated clouds. Scalding ash up to 700 degrees in temperature raced down the slope in just two to three minutes.

By the end of several eruptions, at least 15 people had been killed, a government official told CNN. It was the first time Mount Sinabung’s volcanic output had resulted in deaths, the Jakarta Post reported.

The victims, and at least three other injured people, were all found in Sukameriah, a village close to the volcano’s crater, disaster mitigation agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho told CNN.

Eruptions at Mount Sinabung are becoming common. After about 400 years of minimal volcanic activity there, Sinabung erupted in 2010. It has been emitting gas since September.

The newest volcanic activity has forced people to evacuate 16 villages, the Jakarta Post reported. At least 30,000 people have been temporarily housed at 42 evacuation centers, according to Billy Sumuan, the emergency response director in Indonesia for the humanitarian group World Vision.