New highway encircles stubborn homeowners

In today's trending, a motorway is built around homeowners who refused to move, a playground is built under a flyover in Zhejiang, "Diaoyu Island" restaurant gets renamed, a photo beautifying app leads to assault in an online romance turned sour, and a fake Chinese bank collects $32 million yuan.

The "nail houses" are encircled by an overpass in Guangzhou, South China's Guangdong province. [Photo/chinanews.com]

A room with a 360-degree road view

If you can't build through it, build around it – city planners seem to have taken this advice quite literally.

Motorway builders encircled the homes of three Chinese families with a four-lane flyover after they refused to make way for the bulldozers.

Demolition teams in Guangzhou had planned to destroy the houses in order to connect the city's road network to a recently opened tunnel under the Pearl River.

A photograph of the so-called "nail houses" – so named because they proved difficult to move–completely surrounded by the flyover, proved popular on the Chinese Internet this week.

Some Internet users joked that authorities had given locals homes "with a 360-degree road view".

The "nail houses" are encircled by an overpass in Guangzhou, South China's Guangdong province. [Photo/chinanews.com]

In our next story, another highway may have flattened a portion of a city, but the space beneath it didn't go to waste thanks to some clever planning.