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Gov. Bobby Jindal is heading to Iowa to tout Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Jindal spokesman Kyle Plotkin said the Louisiana governor will travel to Iowa on Thursday for the Romney campaign events.

The appearances are certain to continue speculation that Jindal is a contender to be Romney's pick for a running mate.

Jindal will be one of several Romney surrogates on the campaign trail this week while the former Massachusetts governor is traveling through England, Israel and Poland.

A federal magistrate has ruled that prosecutors aren't required to provide defense attorneys with more details regarding the charges against a former BP engineer accused of deleting text messages about the company's response to the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

U.S. Magistrate Sally Shushan's order Tuesday says Kurt Mix's indictment provides his lawyers with sufficient information to prepare his defense and to "avoid surprise" at trial.

Gov. Bobby Jindal says he's confident LSU's network of public hospitals and clinics will protect health care services, despite cuts that strip a quarter of the system's funding.

Lawmakers have said they don't understand how the university-run health care system can shrink its budget by $329 million this year without shutting facilities that take care of the poor and uninsured.

But Jindal on Tuesday told reporters that "LSU is well on their way to presenting a plan that's going to protect critical services."

ASSUMPTION PARISH — State and local officials are investigating whether an orphaned well may be the source of natural gas bubbling up from the surfaces of Bayou Corne and Grand Bayou in northern Assumption Parish.

Parish officials said Tuesday the well is in swampland about 1,000 feet from the main bubbling area in Bayou Corne, The Advocate (http://bit.ly/PEW2Z5) reports.

Ameritas Technologies says it will open an information technology center in Baton Rouge creating 300 jobs.

The startup company's CEO, Brian Keene, said Tuesday that Ameritas will receive a state economic development grant of $125,000 per year over a 10-year period to offset leasing costs at the Chase Tower in the downtown area.

Gov. Bobby Jindal says Ameritas will start hiring in September and open by October. He says the company expects to reach the 300 mark on staffing by 2016.

Louisiana's top education board has backed accountability standards suggested by Superintendent of Education John White for the private schools that will get taxpayer-subsidized students through the voucher program.

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted 9-2 Tuesday for the criteria.

A consortium set up after the 2010 BP spill to develop methods for containing deep-sea spills is conducting a test of its state-of-the-art equipment with federal regulators looking on.

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said the drill began Tuesday morning.

The Houston-based Marine Well Containment Company is moving a capping stack it has developed to a test wellhead that sits about 7,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.