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.