Slowdown's gift to Beijing: cleaner air

BEIJING

The global economic slowdown is helping to accomplish what some in China’s leadership have striven to do for years: rein in the insatiable demand for coal-powered energy that has fed the country’s breakneck growth but turned it into one of the world’s most polluted nations.

Beijing, China’s normally smog-choked capital, is breathing some of its cleanest air in nearly a decade, as pollution-control efforts get a sizable boost from a slowing economy.