Louisiana

Apartment fire kills 11 family members

Eleven family members died in their suburban New Orleans apartment after a mattress caught fire and became stuck in a door as they tried to drag it out, authorities said.

The fire was started by candles the family members had been using because they moved in just hours earlier and did not yet have electricity, Sheriff Harry Lee said. Four family members escaped. The dead ranged in age from 6 months to 42 years.

“The mattress actually blocked the only means of escape,” Lee said.

Some of the victims apparently died of smoke inhalation, and others from burns, authorities said. The building in Marrero was engulfed in flames when rescue workers arrived shortly before 5 a.m.

All the bodies were found on the second floor, where the fire started. Above, an investigator examined the area Thursday.

Washington, D.C.

EPA orders tougher smog, soot reductions

The Bush administration Thursday ordered reductions in smog and soot pollution across 28 states — not including Kansas — with the goal of making the air cleaner to breathe for people downwind of coal-burning power plants.

Consumers who get electricity from the companies’ plants can expect their monthly power bills to increase eventually by up to $1 to pay for the changes.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s new regulations set pollution quotas for 28 states and the District of Columbia on smog-forming nitrogen oxides and soot-producing sulfur dioxide. Most of the states are east of the Mississippi River.

It is up to states to decide how best to achieve those reductions. But the rule envisions requiring power plants to install new scrubbers for sulfur dioxide or chemical processes for nitrogen oxides as the least costly way.

Florida

Ruling blocks agency from Schiavo case

A judge ruled Thursday that Florida’s social services agency cannot intervene to delay the removal of the feeding tube keeping brain-damaged Terri Schiavo alive.

The Department of Children & Families had asked for a 60-day delay in the removal of the tube, now set for March 18. The agency said it wanted time to investigate allegations of abuse and neglect against the woman’s husband, Michael Schiavo.

But Circuit Judge George W. Greer said those allegations and many others had been investigated in the past and found to be groundless. He said the agency was apparently trying to pull an end run around the court by getting involved at this late stage.

New York City

Suit dismissed against Agent Orange makers

A federal judge Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed on behalf of some 4 million Vietnamese claiming U.S. chemical companies committed war crimes by making Agent Orange for use during the Vietnam War.

U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein disagreed that the allegedly toxic defoliant and similar U.S. herbicides should be considered poisons banned under international rules of war, even though they may have had comparable effects on people and land.

The Brooklyn judge also found the plaintiffs could not prove Agent Orange had caused their illnesses, largely because of a lack of large-scale research.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers said an appeal was planned.

The lawsuit was the first attempt by Vietnamese plaintiffs to seek compensation for the effects of Agent Orange, which is laden with the highly toxic chemical dioxin and has been linked to cancer, diabetes and birth defects.

U.S. aircraft sprayed more than 21 million gallons of the chemical between 1962 to 1971 in attempts to destroy crops and remove foliage used as cover by communist forces.

St. Louis

Neanderthal skeleton reveals bigger waistline

The Neanderthal waistline keeps growing and growing.

The human cousins — which scientists think died out about 30,000 years ago — make modern waists look wasplike, according to anthropologist Gary Sawyer, chief technician at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and Blaine Maley, a former sculptor who is now a Washington University doctoral student in anthropology.

Sawyer and Maley have assembled the first full Neanderthal skeleton, a burly amalgam of bones with a flaring ribcage and pelvis. The model could alter the belief that Neanderthals, from neck to thigh, were shaped like barrels. Sawyer and Maley think they were shaped like bells — even more beefy around the middle than previously thought.

An article detailing the skeleton project results is published today in the online version of the journal The New Anatomist.

Washington, D.C.

Hughes set to rejoin White House staff

Karen Hughes, the longtime adviser to President Bush often described as the most powerful woman ever to work in the White House, plans to return to Washington soon to rejoin the president’s team as he sets forth on an ambitious second-term agenda, according to White House officials and outside Republican advisers.

Seen as a virtual alter ego for Bush who understands how he thinks better than any other adviser, Hughes helped the president build his administration as his counselor in the first term before her surprise resignation in April 2002 to return to Texas with her family.

Hughes has continued to advise Bush from her home in Texas, particularly on major speeches and communications strategies, and she traveled with him during the most difficult days of last year’s campaign.

But now that her son Robert is preparing to head to college this fall, she is ready to return to Washington for more than several days a week to work for the president, although she will not move the family home, sources said.

Chicago

Study: Exercise helps reduce Alzheimer’s

The reason that mentally and physically active people tend to have less Alzheimer’s disease may be that education and exercise supercharge a broad set of genes involved in building a healthier brain, University of Chicago researchers reported Thursday.

While other scientists have reported on one or two genes that become activated with exercise, the study is the first to show that an enriched environment, which includes both learning and physical activity, increases the output of 41 genes in mice.

The genes are involved in maintaining the health of neurons, constructing synaptic connections between them as new memories are laid down, and building new arterial highways to supply more blood and nutrients to the brain.

The findings open a new avenue of research designed to discover how exactly physical and mental exercise promotes enhanced activity of key brain genes. Discoveries could lead to the development of anti-Alzheimer’s drugs.

New York City

Ex-detectives arrested on Mafia charges

Two police detectives led double lives as Mafia hitmen, kidnapping and killing rival gangsters and giving confidential information to the mob for more than a decade, federal prosecutors charged Thursday.

One of the suspects, Louis Eppolito, wrote an autobiography titled “Mafia Cop: The Story of an Honest Cop Whose Family Was the Mob,” which dealt among other things with what he described as false charges of Mafia involvement.

He and his former partner, Stephen Caracappa, were arrested Wednesday night at a restaurant off the Las Vegas Strip, law enforcement officials said. The pair have been living in Las Vegas, across the street from each other, since retiring in the early 1990s.

Each is charged with eight murders, two attempted murders, murder conspiracy, obstruction of justice, drug distribution and money laundering.

Washington, D.C.

Gene mutation linked to blinding illness

The leading cause of blindness in the elderly — age-related macular degeneration — has been linked to a gene mutation, raising hopes of earlier detection and possible treatment.

Fifteen million Americans have the disease, and that number is expected to double as baby boomers age.

Being able to relate a gene mutation to the likelihood of developing the illness may lead to better tests and eventually treatments, the scientists hope.

Macular degeneration causes the central region of the eye’s retina to deteriorate, damaging or destroying vision. For now, there are no broadly effective treatments.

The new gene findings are reported in separate papers in this week’s online issue of the journal Science.