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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Los Angeles may boast some of the best weather among U.S. cities while scoring high in celebrity sightings, but the Southern California metropolis remains unable to shake off its more notorious No. 1 rankings for worst smog and heaviest traffic.

Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city, again topped the charts for ozone pollution, and finished fourth for particulate pollution such as dust and soot, in the American Lung Association’s annual national air quality report card, released on Wednesday.

The farming town of Bakersfield, California, was rated No. 1 for particulates.

The greater Los Angeles area has ranked every year but one since the association’s first report in 2000 as the city with the worst levels for ozone, a key component of smog formed when sunlight reacts with hydrocarbon and nitrous oxide emissions.

A major source of ozone pollutants is tailpipe emissions from automobiles, which in turn account for Los Angeles’ No. 1 ranking this year as the nation’s most traffic-clogged city, according to a separate annual study released on Wednesday.

Honolulu dropped from first to second place in traffic congestion, followed by San Francisco at No. 3, the traffic-data company Inrix, based in Seattle, reported.

Inrix also found road and highway congestion in the Los Angeles area was back on the rise in early 2013 after two straight years of decline, a likely reflection of an improved economy.

Los Angeles has roughly 10 times more roads than Honolulu, but the Inrix study provides a comparative gauge of travel time it calls the “gridlock index,” which measures the intensity of traffic congestion to local drivers as it occurs.

According to Inrix, the average Los Angeles motorist wasted 59 hours last year in jammed traffic, compared with 50 hours for the average Honolulu driver.

In terms of air quality, California as a whole dominated the list of the most polluted U.S. cities, accounting for seven of the top 10 for ozone and eight of the top 10 for annual levels of particulate pollution, the American Lung Association said.

Nearly 90 percent of Californians, or 33.5 million people, live in areas plagued by unhealthy air, especially in Los Angeles, the so-called Inland Empire region east of the city, the state capital of Sacramento, and the agricultural heartland of the San Joaquin Valley, the group’s study found.

Those residents are at greater risk for asthma attacks, heart attacks and premature death, the association said.

However, many California cities have shown steady progress on improving air quality, particularly the Los Angeles region, whose ozone levels have fallen by 36 percent since the organization’s first State of the Air report card in 2000.

The region’s annual particle pollution has dropped by 43 percent in that time and is now close to meeting the federal year-round standard for particulates.

The U.S. cities ranked as having the cleanest air in the latest report were Ames, Iowa, for ozone and Cheyenne, Wyoming, for annual particulate pollution.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman; Additional reporting by Dana Feldman; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Eric Beech)

Story By: by Alastair Bland

Guinea pigs at a farm for the animals in Puno, Peru, where they’re considered a delicacy.

You may best know the guinea pig as a nervous little pet that lives in a cage and eats alfalfa pellets.

Now, the rodents are increasingly showing up on plates in the United States.

South American restaurants on both coasts seem to be pushing the trend, answering to demand mostly from Andean expats for what is considered a fine and valuable food in Ecuador, Peru and Colombia. Middle-class foodies with a taste for exotic delicacies are also ordering, photographing and blogging about guinea pig. The animals — called cuyes in Spanish — are usually cooked whole, often grilled, sometimes deep fried. Many diners eat every last morsel, literally from head to toe.

Guinea pigs on the grill

But there may be more to gain from eating guinea pig than bizarre foods bragging rights. According to activists, eating guinea pig is good for the environment.

Matt Miller, an Idaho-based science writer with The Nature Conservancy, says rodents and other small livestock represent a low-impact meat alternative to carbon-costly beef. Miller, who is writing a book about the ecological benefits of eating unconventional meats, visited Colombia several years ago. At the time, he says, conservation groups were expressing concern about local ranchers clearing forest to provide pasture for their cattle — activity that was causing erosion and water pollution.

“They were encouraging people to switch from cattle to guinea pigs,” Miller says. “Guinea pigs don’t require the land that cattle do. They can be kept in backyards, or in your home. They’re docile and easy to raise.”

The Little Rock-based humanitarian organization Heifer International, which assists communities in enhancing their economies and streamlining local food production, is also promoting guinea pig husbandry in Peru, Ecuador and Guatemala. Jason Woods, the nonprofit’s Americas regional program assistant, says guinea pigs — which he says usually weigh no more than 2 pounds — are twice as efficient as cows at turning food, like hay and compost scraps, into meat: To render a pound of meat, a cow, he explains, may require 8 pounds of feed. A guinea pig only needs 4.

To help start a home guinea pig farm, Heifer International typically supplies a family with one male and seven females. In just months, such a collection may have doubled in size. Woods says a guinea pig herd consisting of two males and 20 females can sustain itself while providing meat for a family of six.

In the United States, most guinea pigs intended for human consumption come from Peru as whole, frozen, hairless rodents in plastic bags.

The Salt contacted several federal regulatory agencies, including USDA and Fish and Wildlife, but none seemed to track guinea pig imports. However, we spoke with the owners of two Peruvian food importers who said cuy consumption in the United States is certainly rising. Neither would speak on record, but each said they are now importing more guinea pigs than ever before.

At one company, in Connecticut, imports have nearly doubled since 2008 — from 600 guinea pigs per year then to more than 1,000 today.

Urubamba, a Peruvian restaurant in Queens, wasn’t serving guinea pig at all eight years ago. Since then, demand has climbed every year, according to Carlos Atorga, who opened Urubamba in 1976.

Now, Urubamba customers can expect cuy on the menu about one weekend each month. The animals go for $17 a plate, each cuy splayed down the middle like a lobster and served with a front leg and a back, an eye, an ear and a nostril.

In San Francisco, Diego Oka, a native of Peru and the executive chef of La Mar Cebicheria, serves imported Peruvian cuy every summer around Peru’s July 28 Independence Day. Oka marinates and deep-fries his guinea pigs for a dish called cuy chactado. He says the nose, ears and fingery little hands are the best bites of all — but Oka removes the animals’ extremities to avoid offending sensitive diners.

In Los Angeles, Helen Springut, co-founder of the adventurous eaters club Gastronauts, says guinea pig is a food worth pursuing only as a cultural experience. She says the meat can be tough and stringy.

I ate a quarter of a grilled guinea pig recently during a cycling trip in Ecuador. The sinewy meat was dry and sparse, and I went away hungry. But others describe what sounds like a different creature.

Miller at The Nature Conservancy says guinea pig is “delicious, very tender and hard to compare to anything else” — not even chicken. Chef Astorga at Urubamba says cuy — which he describes as “about the size of a squirrel” — has “tender flesh and very tender skin.” La Mar Cebicheria’s Chef Oka says cuy is “very oily, like pork combined with rabbit.”

While guinea pig may be attaining star status as a hold-your-nose-and-roll-the-camera bizarre food, whether an animal so favored as a pet in the United States will become a mainstream piece of protein is, perhaps, doubtful.

“There’s a clear cultural prejudice against eating guinea pigs, and rodents in general, in the United States,” Miller says. “But finding ways to reduce our carbon footprint is a good idea, and so is eating small livestock, like guinea pigs.”

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China will spend 100 billion yuan ($16 billion) over three years to deal with Beijing’s pollution, an official newspaper reported on Friday, as the government tries to defuse mounting public anger over environmental degradation.

Beijing’s government has pledged to improve sewage disposal, garbage treatment and air quality, as well as crack down on illegal construction, the China Daily newspaper said, citing a three-year plan released on Thursday.

Air quality in Beijing, a city of around 20 million people, has mostly stayed above “very unhealthy” and “hazardous” levels since the beginning of this year.

Pollution was one of the key themes at the recent National Party Congress, where China’s new leaders were confirmed. Many Chinese feel the government lacks bite when it comes to enforcing policies designed to protect the environment.

Beijing’s plan includes laying or upgrading 1,290 km (800 miles) of sewage pipeline, building five garbage incineration plants, setting up 47 water recycling plants and upgrading 20 sewage disposal plants, said China Daily.

Beijing Mayor Wang Anshun called on the government to allow the private sector to participate in these investments.

The government also plans to curb illegal construction and land use, and will compile a list of illegal buildings for demolition next year, Beijing Deputy Mayor Wang Wei told China Daily.

Most of China’s major cities are plagued by pollution of one sort or another. Earlier this month thousands of dead pigs were found floating in one of Shanghai’s main water sources.

($1 = 6.2143 Chinese yuan)

(Reporting by Adam Jourdan; Editing by Stephen Coates and Miral Fahmy)

Story By: by Dan Charles

Wild bees, such as this Andrena bee visiting highbush blueberry flowers, play a key role in boosting crop yields.

Hired beekeepers work to pollinate an almond orchard near Snelling, Calif. Wild bees play a critical role in helping honeybees pollinate crops, but they often can’t survive on modern monoculture farms.

In fact, Burkle says, if you map the interactions between flowers and bees, they seem more tenuous now. Some flowers may get visited by just one or two kinds of bees, and maybe just for one week.

“I don’t know that these systems can take a lot more environmental change without something drastic happening,” she says.

Many bee researchers are trying to figure out how to help those native bees — and how to help farmers who benefit from them.

Claire Kremen, a conservation biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who’s a co-author of the first study in Science, says one of the biggest problems for wild bees is the agricultural specialization that has produced huge fields of just one crop.

The almond groves of California, for example, are a sea of blossoms in February. It’s a feast, as far as the eye can see, for honeybees that come here from all over the country.

“But for the rest of the year, there’s nothing blooming,” she says.

That means there are no bees. “In fact, in places where we have very large monocultures of almond, we don’t find any native bees anymore,” Kremen says.

Planting other flowers in and around these almond groves, maybe as hedgerows, blooming all summer long, would help, she says.

Even better would be farms with smaller fields, and lots of different crops flowering at different times. Wild bees, Kremen says, need diversity.