They Brought Bad Things to Life

Meanwhile, in another legal victory on the other side of the country, a federal court yesterday rejected General Electric's constitutional challenge to the U.S. EPA's power to force the company to clean up the Hudson River. From the 1940s to the 1970s, GE dumped 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the upper Hudson, where 500,000 to 700,000 pounds of toxic sludge remain today. For years, environmentalists and GE haggled over how best to clean the river -- a dispute that was settled last year when the EPA mandated a $490 million plan to dredge 40 miles of the Hudson under the Superfund cleanup program. GE challenged that plan in court, saying the Superfund program violated due process guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. But yesterday, U.S. District Judge John Bates said GE did not have standing to sue, because the EPA has not taken legal action against the company.