Secret fed orders to be revealed
Secret fed orders to be revealed
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department is declassifying portions of some secret court orders concerning the government’s authority to seize records under the Patriot Act.
The department revealed its decision to declassify the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions in a filing with the federal court in the Northern District of California Wednesday. The government says it will provide hundreds of pages of documents to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties group that had filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.
The release of the records is in response to an order issued by a federal judge in California. In its filing, the Justice Department said it was “broadly construing” that order and is declassifying a larger set of documents than the ruling required.
The Justice Department said it would provide the document to the foundation by Tuesday.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is seeking documents about the government’s interpretation and use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the government to seize a wide range of documents. Under that section, the government must show that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that the records are relevant to an investigation intended to “protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”
David Sobel, the foundation’s senior counsel, said it was “unfortunate” that it took his group’s lawsuit to make the material public.
Carnival cruises to cut pollution
WASHINGTON — The world’s largest cruise ship company will adopt technology from power plants and automobiles to reduce air pollution from the massive diesel engines powering its ships.
In a tentative agreement reached Thursday with the Environmental Protection Agency, Carnival Corp. will deploy scrubbers to reduce sulfur dioxide and filters to trap soot on as many as 32 ships over the next three years. At port, the ships will either plug into the electrical grid, rather than idle, to reduce pollution or use a lower sulfur fuel.
Emissions from oceangoing vessels had largely been unregulated and contributed to 30 major U.S. ports violating air pollution standards. In 2010, the International Maritime Organization, at the EPA’s request, created buffer zones along U.S. coasts requiring foreign-flagged ships to reduce pollution.
The steps Carnival is committing to take will cost the company more than $180 million and apply to ships operated by Carnival Cruise Lines, Holland America Line, Princess Cruises and Cunard.
But if the technology does not meet or exceed the standard, as Carnival expects, the company will have to resort to a more expensive solution, lower sulfur fuel.
Scrubbers have been employed on power plants for decades and diesel trucks and cars have long used filters to reduce the soot that comes from exhausts.
Hunter caused Yosemite wildfire
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A gigantic wildfire in and around Yosemite National Park was caused by an illegal fire set by a hunter, the U.S. Forest Service said Thursday.
The agency said there is no indication the hunter was involved with illegal marijuana cultivation, which a local fire chief had speculated as the possible cause of the blaze.
No arrests have been made, and the hunter’s name was being withheld pending further investigation, according to the Forest Service. The only legal hunting allowed at the time the fire started Aug. 17 was archery for bear and deer.
Bacteria might help fight obesity
WASHINGTON (AP) — Call it a hidden ally: The right germs just might be able to help fight fat.
Different kinds of bacteria that live inside the gut can help spur obesity or protect against it, say scientists at Washington University in St. Louis who transplanted intestinal germs from fat or lean people into mice and watched the rodents change.
And what they ate determined whether the good germs could move in and do their job.
Thursday’s report raises the possibility of one day turning gut bacteria into personalized fat-fighting therapies, and it may help explain why some people have a harder time losing weight than others do.
“It’s an important player,” said Dr. David Relman of Stanford University, who also studies how gut bacteria influence health but wasn’t involved in the new research. “This paper says that diet and microbes are necessary companions in all of this. They literally and figuratively feed each other.”
The research was reported in the journal Science.
We all develop with an essentially sterile digestive tract. Bacteria rapidly move in starting at birth — bugs that we pick up from mom and dad, the environment, first foods. Ultimately, the intestine teems with hundreds of species, populations that differ in people with varying health. Overweight people harbor different types and amounts of gut bacteria than lean people, for example. The gut bacteria we pick up as children can stick with us for decades, although their makeup changes when people lose weight, previous studies have shown.
Clearly, what you eat and how much you move are key to how much you weigh. But are those bacterial differences a contributing cause of obesity, rather than simply the result of it? If so, which bugs are to blame, and might it be possible to switch out the bad actors?
To start finding out, Washington University graduate student Vanessa Ridaura took gut bacteria from eight people — four pairs of twins that each included one obese sibling and one lean sibling. One pair of twins was identical, ruling out an inherited explanation for their different weights. Using twins also guaranteed similar childhood environments and diets.
She transplanted the human microbes into the intestines of young mice that had been raised germ-free.
The mice who received gut bacteria from the obese people gained more weight — and experienced unhealthy metabolic changes — even though they didn’t eat more than the mice who received germs from the lean twins, said study senior author Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, director of Washington University’s Center of Genome Sciences and Systems Biology.
Then came what Gordon calls the battle of the microbes. Mice that harbored gut bacteria from a lean person were put in the same cages as mice that harbored the obesity-prone germs. The research team took advantage of an icky fact of rodent life: Mice eat feces, so presumably they could easily swap intestinal bugs.
What happened was a surprise. Certain bacteria from the lean mice invaded the intestines of the fatter mice, and their weight and metabolism improved. But the trade was one-way — the lean mice weren’t affected.
Moreover, the fatter mice got the bacterial benefit only when they were fed a low-fat, high-fiber diet. When Ridaura substituted the higher-fat, lower-fiber diet typical of Americans, the protective bug swap didn’t occur.
Why? Gordon already knew from human studies that obese people harbor less diverse gut bacteria. “It was almost as if there were potential job vacancies” in their intestines that the lean don’t have, he explained.
Sure enough, a closer look at the mice that benefited from the bug swap suggests a specific type of bacteria, from a family named Bacteroidetes, moved into previously unoccupied niches in their colons — if the rodents ate right.
How might those findings translate to people? For a particularly hard-to-treat diarrheal infection, doctors sometimes transplant stool from a healthy person into the sick person’s intestine. Some scientists wonder if fecal transplants from the lean to the fat might treat obesity, too.
But Gordon foresees a less invasive alternative: Determining the best combinations of intestinal bacteria to match a person’s diet, and then growing those bugs in sterile lab dishes — like this study could — and turning them into pills. He estimates such an attempt would take at least five more years of research.