“Landlords must accept Section 8 vouchers and certificates from tenants,” according to a recent press release from the city’s Human Relations Commission, “unless the landlords have a legitimate non-discriminatory reason not to do so.” The city’s fair-housing ordinance prohibits discrimination based on source of income, and Section 8 vouchers and certificates, which often serve as the lifeline for public-housing residents trying to move into the private-housing market, are considered a source of income.
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The farmers did it. A “nitrogen budget” prepared by Mark David and Lowell Gentry of the University of Illinois “shows conclusively that agriculture is by far the biggest source of nitrogen in the state,” they write in the current issue of Illinois Research, Teaching, Outreach. Farm fertilizer and nitrogen-fixing crops produce 89 percent of the 3.5 billion pounds of nitrogen added to the land every year. Everything else is tiny by comparison: lawns and golf courses contribute 2 percent, rainfall 9 percent. Excess nitrogen is strongly suspected of polluting waterways and killing marine life outright in the Gulf of Mexico, and these figures leave little doubt where most of it is coming from.
Only if he can get his pants unstuck. From the Illinois State Bar Association’s “Bar News” (March 15): “Harold W. Sullivan, the glue that has solidified the stature of the Illinois Judges Association since its formation in 1971, will leave the bench…”
