Pollution

Zhang Huimin, 8, skips, walks and jogs along National Highway 107, an impish girl in an undersized red tracksuit. She has been going since 2 a.m. and it's close to noon, but she's keeping a steady pace, driven by a goal: to complete the 2,150-mile trip from her hometown in southern Hainan province to Beijing's Tiananmen Square, the political heart of China.

Cremation fires crackle all day long on the chipped concrete steps of this riverside holy city, the blazes spewing ash and flakes over the mourners who crowd its famous piers. Sweating, bare-chested men stoke the funeral pyres, squinting against the sting of smoke as they lug and stack the bundles of logs needed to burn the procession of Hindu dead. And when the bodies are incinerated and the families have taken away the ashes of their loved ones, the men sweep the residue into the Ganges River.

Indiana is moving to scale back limits on pollutants dumped into a Lake Michigan tributary by the sprawling U.S. Steel Corp. mill in Gary, according to environmental lawyers and former federal regulators who have reviewed a proposed water permit.

More girls than boys are born in some Canadian communities because airborne pollutants, called dioxins, can alter normal sex ratios, even if the source of the pollution is many miles away, according to a study published this month in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. Normally, 51% of births are boys and 49% are girls.

The inhabitants of this metropolis of 12 million people, and perhaps as many cars, buses, trucks and motorbikes, have seen something new in recent months: the city itself, unobscured by the thick smog that normally blankets the capital. For years, pollution in Tehran seemed to only grow worse, the stench of exhaust more dizzying, the number of patients rushed to hospitals with breathing difficulties ever increasing.

If Aly Hartman could have placed herself in a protective bubble for the duration of her recent pregnancy, she would have done so. The Marina del Rey woman, 28, cut out alcohol, sodas and caffeine. She replaced her sugary breakfast cereal with crackling oat bran, quit eating Taco Bell MexiMelts and began stocking up on organic fruits and vegetables. She ducked back into her car while pumping gas and, when driving, sped around vehicles emitting thick fumes.

Rick Allnutt has closed all but one section of his funeral home on the north end of town. The chapel is dark and quiet, the reception hall bare. But in the bay out back, two side-by-side ovens rumble as the 1,650-degree heat blasts two corpses into bone and ash. Allnutt has moved the rest of the business to another location and wants to move his crematory to a site near a cemetery in Larimer County, but he has reached a stalemate with health officials there.

With the naming of a master designer this week for the Orange County Great Park, supporters are agleam with its potential. Now comes the hard part: dealing with toxic leftovers at the former El Toro Marine base in Irvine where the park will be located. About 900 acres of concrete and asphalt runways must be pulverized and carted away.

Edison International, PG&E Corp. and other suppliers of electricity in California will be required by state regulators to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Power companies in the most populous state will face a cap intended to bring emissions down, possibly to 1990 levels, according to a measure approved Thursday by the California Public Utilities Commission. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said last year that he wanted the state to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Turning a blind eye to environmental degradation could now cost Chinese officials their jobs, state media announced Tuesday. However, environmentalists raised concerns about enforcement of the new regulations. The government announcement comes in the wake of a string of embarrassing pollution incidents that forced Beijing to grapple with the downside of a runaway economy: its effect on the ecosystem and public health.