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{ A secretive U.S. spy court has ruled again that the National Security Agency can keep collecting every American’s telephone records every day, in the midst of dueling decisions in two other federal courts about whether the surveillance program is constitutional.}

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Friday renewed the NSA phone collection program, said Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Such periodic requests are somewhat formulaic but required since the program started in 2006.

The latest approval was the first since two conflicting court decisions about whether the program is lawful and since a presidential advisory panel recommended that the NSA no longer be allowed to collect and store the phone records and search them without obtaining separate court approval for each search.

In a statement, Turner said that 15 judges on the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on 36 occasions over the past seven years have approved the NSA’s collection of U.S. phone records as lawful.

Also Friday, government lawyers turned to U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to block one federal judge’s decision that threatens the NSA phone records program.

The opposing lawyer who spearheaded the effort that led to the ruling said he hopes to take the issue directly to the Supreme Court.

The Justice Department filed a one-page notice of appeal asking the appeals court to overturn U.S. District Judge Richard Leon’s ruling last month that the program was likely unconstitutional. The government’s move had been expected.

Larry Klayman, who filed the class-action suit against President Barack Obama and top administration national security officials, said he intends to petition the federal appeals court next week to send the case directly to the Supreme Court. Klayman said the move was justified because the NSA case was a matter of great public importance.

“There are exigent circumstances here,” Klayman said. “We can’t allow this situation to continue. The NSA’s continuing to spy on everybody.”

Turner said U.S. intelligence agencies would be willing to modify the phone records surveillance program to provide additional privacy and civil liberties protections as long as it was still operationally beneficial. He said the Obama administration was carefully evaluating the advisory panel’s recent recommendations.

Judges sitting on the secretive spy court have repeatedly approved the program for 90-day periods. They also have repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of the program — a judicial bulwark that held strong until Leon’s surprise decision last month.

Leon said the NSA’s program was “almost Orwellian,” a reference to writer George Orwell’s futuristic novel “1984,” and that there was little evidence the operation had prevented terrorist attacks. He ruled against the government but agreed to postpone shutting down the program until the government could appeal.

In a separate case involving the same NSA phone records program, a district judge in New York last month upheld the government’s data collection as lawful. The American Civil Liberties Union, which lost that case, said this week it will appeal to a federal appeals court in New York.

AP

{The Obama administration proposed two new federal gun control rules Friday to ensure more information about the mentally ill reaches background check databases, after a series of high-profile US shootings.}

The rules come on top of a series of executive actions President Barack Obama announced after the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting that left 20 young children and six staff dead in December 2012.

The massacre relaunched a push for gun control laws in America and a handful of states have since tightened gun rules.

But the national measures Obama sought, including a plan for enhanced background checks on gun buyers and a ban on assault-style rifles, failed in the US Senate in April due to fierce opposition from gun rights supporters.

In the first nine months of 2013 following a presidential directive, federal agencies have provided more than 1.2 million records identifying persons prohibited from buying or owning guns for mental health reasons, the White House said.

The figure is a 23 percent increase from the number of records that federal agencies had made available by the end of January 2013.

Under the new rules proposed by the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services, the federal background check database would be able to access some mental health records, due to an exemption to existing privacy law.

The Justice Department is also proposing to “clarify” that people involuntarily held at inpatient and outpatient institutions should be barred from buying guns.

“Too many Americans have been severely injured or lost their lives as a result of gun violence,” the White House said.

“While the vast majority of Americans who experience a mental illness are not violent, in some cases when persons with a mental illness do not receive the treatment they need, the result can be tragedies.”

The White House renewed its call for congressional action, including expanding background checks and making gun trafficking a federal crime.

“Passing common-sense gun safety legislation… remains the most important step we can take to reduce gun violence,” it said.

“The vast majority of Americans support these critical measures, which would protect our children and our communities without infringing on anyone’s Second Amendment rights (to keep and bear arms).”

Despite the effort, background checks are not required for the many private purchases that take place outside of licensed gun dealers, such as online or at gun shows.

In a stark reminder of guns in America, a man shot 12 people dead at a US Navy facility a few miles (kilometers) from the White House in September.

AFP

{Bangladesh’s opposition began enforcing a 48-hour general strike on the eve of elections as its leader remains confined to her home.}

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which is boycotting Sunday’s polls, called the Saturday strike in a final bid to torpedo a contest which is already sure to be won by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League.

The strike comes after BNP leader Khaleda Zia issued an appeal to voters to also “completely boycott” what she called “a scandalous farce” and accused the government of placing her under house arrest.

The vote build-up has been dominated by violence, with election-related unrest killing around 150 people since the date was set in October.

Observers fear the contest will spur new unrest after Bangladesh endured its bloodiest 12 months since the brutal 1971 independence war against Pakistan.

The main headline in Saturday’s Dhaka Tribune read: “Tension, fear mark build-up to the polls” while all newspapers carried pictures of the latest victims of the violence, many of them with horrific burns.

Although the government officially denies Zia has been detained, aides say she has been barred from leaving her Dhaka home for nearly a week.

Dozens of riot police could be seen outside her home on Saturday, along with water-cannon and sand trucks, preventing anyone from crossing through barriers.

In her first public comments since her confinement, Zia said “the government has effectively placed me under house arrest and my house has been sealed off by security and intelligence agents”.

The BNP and 20 other parties are boycotting the polls after Hasina rejected their demands that it be overseen by a neutral caretaker government.

Aljazeera

{Just days after Colorado became the first US state to allow recreational marijuana use, French researchers are citing a potential new breakthrough in preventing cannabis addiction. }

On Thursday, French scientists said their work had found that a naturally occurring hormone acts as spontaneous defense in the brain against the “high” caused by marijuana – and could therefore be useful in treating addiction to the drug.

Studying lab rats, the researchers found that the steroid hormone pregnenolone reduced the activity of a particular brain molecule called the type-1 cannabinoid receptor (CB1).

The hormone, which was not previously believed to have any biological effect of its own, actually cancels out the mild euphoria induced by THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, according to lead author Pier Vincenzo Piazza of the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM).

“These researchers weren’t trying to be buzzkills,” said the journal Science, in which the study appears. “Their discovery could lead to new approaches to treating marijuana intoxication and addiction — and it may allow researchers to isolate the medicinal properties of cannabis while blocking its behavioral and somatic effects.”

Clinical trials in humans upcoming

About 147 million people globally (roughly 2.5 percent of the population) use cannabis, according to the World Health Organization.

While marijuana is known to relieve symptoms of depression, glaucoma, spasms and the nausea associated with cancer and AIDS treatment, they can also impair brain development, memory and lung function, and some specialists can lead to addiction.

Researchers discovered the previously unknown role of pregnenolone when they gave high doses of cannabis to lab rats – roughly three to 10 times more than the typical human marijuana smoker might be exposed to, Piazza told Agence France-Presse.

The high doses of cannabis raised the brain’s level of pregnenolone, which, in turn, blocked the harmful effects of THC on the brain.

Piazza told AFP that the researchers were aiming to launch clinical trials in people within a year and a half.

Meanwhile, in the US, legal recreational use of marijuana may hit more states in the coming months. The state of Washington, in the Pacific Northwest, is set to follow in Colorado’s footsteps later this year, with similar efforts being planned in Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada and Oregon.

Under federal law, however, cannabis — like heroin, LSD and ecstasy — is considered illegal.

(With AFP and Reuters)