Iowa landfills will have to comply
with a federal law requiring that disposal sites be lined with clay or
plastic to keep leachate from leaking
The Des Moines Register
reported yesterday that starting in January, Iowa
landfills will have to comply with a federal law requiring that disposal
sites be lined with clay or plastic to keep leachate from leaking --
or should that be leakage from leaching? -- into local waterways.
The law referred to but not identified in the story is Subtitle D of
the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
According to the article, Iowa is the last state in the Midwest to
enforce the rule. Which makes me wonder: Am I the only one who's
surprised that Subtitle D -- enacted all the way back during the reign
of George Bush I -- isn't the law of the land everywhere?
On to weightier subject matter. Reuters (among others)
reports that the Iranian government is blaming Britain
after two synchronized trash-bin bombs killed six people in Ahvaz,
Iran, over the weekend. Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, says
he's "very suspicious about the role of British forces," and a top
Iranian newspaper proclaims that the bombings "had a British accent."
If I may mix a metaphor, Iran's finger-pointing smells very
knee-jerky to me. I doubt that Tony Blair has contacted Tehran to claim
responsibility for the bombings. And Iran has a history of blaming the
U.K. for misfortunes that befall it.
One sentence in the story chilled me and reminded me of one of the
good reasons that the U.S. is trying to install a democratic
government in Iraq (bloody, costly and strife-ridden though that
campaign most assuredly is).
An Iranian military official, Brigadier General Mohsen Kazemeini,
notes that a number of people have been rounded up since the weekend
bombings and that some of the suspects have confessed to receiving
support and training from British forces in Iraq.
Then there's this: Kazemeini "said all of those under arrest would be
tried and executed." Just like that. Not "tried, and if they are found
guilty ... ."
Triedandexecuted.
Or maybe a more telling rendering would be: (tried and) executed. The
corollary, of course, being that you can always drop the parenthetical
phrase and the meaning will stay the same.
Pete Fehrenbach
is assistant managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this
column are collected in
the Inbox
archive.
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