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People in China rang in the Year of the Horse overnight with the traditional barrage of fireworks, but Lunar New Year's celebrations in some cities were quieter than usual. After severe pollution choked much of eastern China last year, many people swore off the ancient tradition so they could protect their lungs and the environment.

Shanghai resident Shen Bingling used to celebrate by wheeling a luggage cart full of fireworks onto a street and joining the neighbors in igniting a frenzy of pyrotechnics. Chunks of burned paper would rain down and the air would fill with clouds that smelled of sulfur. Shen, who works as a doorman in a downtown apartment building, says he wouldn't dream of doing something like that today.

"According to our Chinese people's tradition, to have good fortune you should set off fireworks," says Shen, 55, who wore a red scarf in honor of the Lunar New Year. "But for the sake of the air now, you shouldn't."

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A classified document that's among the many secrets revealed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden "shows that Canada's electronic spy agency used information from the free Internet service at a major Canadian airport to track the wireless devices of thousands of ordinary airline passengers for days after they left the terminal," CBC News reports.

The Canadian broadcaster has posted a "redacted PDF" about what Communications Security Establishment Canada, that nation's NSA, did during a two-week long test.

The CBC says the document indicates that "the spy service was provided with information captured from unsuspecting travelers' wireless devices by [an unidentified] airport's free Wi-Fi system" over a two-week period in May 2012.

"The document shows the federal intelligence agency was then able to track the travelers for a week or more as they — and their wireless devices — showed up in other Wi-Fi 'hot spots' in cities across Canada and even at U.S. airports," the CBC adds.

The Canadian spy agency tells the CBC that it is "mandated to collect foreign signals intelligence to protect Canada and Canadians. And in order to fulfill that key foreign intelligence role for the country, CSEC is legally authorized to collect and analyze metadata. ... No Canadian communications were (or are) targeted, collected or used."

That explanation is similar to those provided by U.S. officials about the NSA's electronic surveillance programs — basically, that the NSA collects huge amounts of information (metadata) about phone calls and other electronic communications, but does not probe their contents or target those of U.S. citizens.

Canadian cyber-security expert Ronald Deibert tells CBC News, however, that "I can't see any circumstance in which this would not be unlawful, under current Canadian law."

President Obama has said that "critics are right to point out that without proper safeguards," the NSA's surveillance programs "could be used to yield more information about our private lives." But while he has said the NSA should no longer hold on to the massive amounts of data it has been collecting, the president has also said that the information still needs to be gathered and stored — by tech and telephone companies — in case it later needs to be analyzed.

Panama says it will release most of the crew of a North Korean ship that was seized six months ago after it was found carrying Soviet-era jet planes and weapons from Cuba in violation of U.N. sanctions on Pyongyang.

Panama says it will release 32 crew members, but that the captain and two others will remain in custody to face charges of trafficking.

The container ship, the Chong Chon Gang, was stopped on the Atlantic side of the Canal in July. Officials said its cargo – which reportedly included 25 containers of military hardware, including two Cold War-era MiG-21 fighter aircraft, air defense systems, missiles and command-and-control vehicles – had endangered Panama's internal security.

The weapons were found in the ship's hold stored under hundreds of bags of sugar.

Havana had said at the time that it was sending the "obsolete" defensive weapons to North Korea to be repaired, a view echoed by North Korea's state-run Central News Agency.

But a U.N. team sent to investigate issued a preliminary reporting saying the shipment violated sanctions imposed over North Korea's nuclear program, which bans weapons exports and the import of all but small arms, the BBC says.

The BBC says that earlier this month, the ship's owners agreed to pay $670,000 to have it released, sans the cargo.

The captain and the two other crew members face a possible 12-year sentence in Panama if convicted on charges of arms trafficking.

Vodka is our enemy, the Russian proverb goes, so we'll utterly consume it. This embrace of the enemy has a lot to do with the country's abysmal life expectancy rates, with one quarter of Russian men dying before age 55. But when the drinkers start cutting back, death rates drop almost immediately, a study finds.

"High mortality absolutely is caused by hazardous alcohol consumption," says Dr. David Zaridze of the Russian Cancer Research Center of Moscow, who with his colleagues tracked Russian drinking habits for a decade.

Indeed, the most striking thing about this study, which was published Thursday in The Lancet, is how closely changes in the country's mortality rates followed changes in Russian government policies on alcohol.

When the Soviet Union put prohibition in place in the mid-1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev, alcohol use dropped 25 percent. Death rates among men under 55 dropped. Drinking started creeping back up, and so did deaths. Both spiked after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. "The first event of the free market was cheap vodka and cheap cigarettes," Zaridze told Shots. "Of course the Russians who hadn't seen cheap vodka started to drink again."

Mortality rates rose again during the hard times after the collapse of the ruble in 1998, but have been declining for almost a decade, a change Zaridze says is due to tighter regulation of vodka sales starting in 2006 under Vladimir Putin.

That includes restricting retail sales to licensed liquor stores and banning night sales. "Since 2006 the per-capita sales of strong alcohol have declined by 33 percent," Zaridze told Shots. "This has been followed by decrease in mortality. This is our aim, our final aim."

Women's death rates also reflected alcohol policy, but less strongly. In Russia, vodka remains a man's drink, consumed neat. And though consumption of beer and wine has risen in recent years, vodka remains the alcohol delivery system of choice.

This is the first study to track the drinking habits of a large group of Russians, following 151,000 people for more than a decade. The men who drank the most, three or more half-liter bottles of vodka a week, were much more likely to die before age 55 than those who said they drank less than one bottle a week.

A lot of that vodka was downed in binges, which may also contribute to the high death rate. Some deaths were from alcohol poisoning or cancer. Others were due to violence, accidents or suicide.

But the fact that Russians are drinking less doesn't mean social attitudes about alcohol have changed, Zaridze says. "I don't think so, unfortunately."

In Russia, he says, "drinking is a socially accepted way of life. Everyone drinks; educated people, not educated people, all social classes. It is accepted and appreciated." But people need to realize, he says, that "alcohol kills [the] nation."

That's not an impossible shift, Zaridze says, pointing to other European countries with a long history of extreme consumption of spirits. "Even our Nordic neighbors, the Finns, the Swedes, they had a real problem with drinking. But they have changed."