The Kansas Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked a grand jury from obtaining patient records from a physician who is one of the nation's few late-term abortion providers.

The grand jury is investigating whether Dr. George Tiller has broken Kansas laws restricting abortion, as many abortion opponents allege. The grand jury subpoenaed the medical files of about 2,000 women, including some who decided against having abortions.

Abortion opponents forced Sedgwick County to convene the grand jury by submitting petitions, the second such citizen investigation since 2006 of Tiller, who has long been at the center of the nation's abortion battle. His clinic was bombed in 1985, and eight years later a woman shot him in both arms.

Tiller's attorneys asked the Supreme Court to quash the grand jury's subpoenas, and the court agreed to block their enforcement until it considers the issue.

Chief Justice Kay McFarland said Tiller's challenge raised "significant issues" about patients' privacy and a grand jury's power to subpoena records.

The Sedgwick County prosecutor presenting evidence to the grand jury had objected to the attempts to block the subpoenas, noting that the grand jury's term is limited, but McFarland said the grand jury's term can be extended.

The court set a Feb. 11 deadline for legal arguments in favor of allowing the subpoenas. Tiller's attorneys then have until Feb. 25 to respond.

Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life, the state's largest anti-abortion group, called the high court's decision "extremely disappointing."

"There is no way to determine if the reasons for these late abortions were done within the narrow legal criteria without looking at the records themselves," she said. "His lawyers say they are worried about women's privacy. They are worried about protecting Dr. Tiller."

Tiller's attorneys, Dan Monnat and Lee Thompson, did not immediately return calls seeking comment Tuesday.

The grand jury is seeking records of all women who visited Tiller's clinic between July 2003 and last month and were at least 22 weeks pregnant at the time. The grand jury also subpoenaed information about current and former employees and referring physicians.

The edited patient records would not have the women's names, but they would have patient identification numbers. Tiller's attorneys claimed in court last week that in an earlier investigation, former Attorney General Phill Kline was able to track down patients' names using the identifying numbers on patients' files.

A spokesman for Kline, who is now Johnson County district attorney, denied that any patients had ever been identified.

Kline eventually filed 30 misdemeanor charges against Tiller before leaving office last year, only to see the case dismissed for jurisdictional reasons.

Callahan asked the Supreme Court Wednesday afternooon to stop the execution.

The Supreme Court on Jan. 7 heard oral arguments in a Kentucky challenge to lethal injection, a case that has delayed executions nationwide. A ruling is unlikely before spring. Alabama uses lethal injection in its executions.

In a 2-1 decision, the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday lifted the stay granted by U.S. District Judge Keith Watkins in Montgomery on Dec. 14.

The court said Callahan waited too late to challenge the method of execution.

Callahan, who is now scheduled to die at 6 p.m. Thursday at Holman prison near Atmore, was sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape and murder of Jacksonville State University student Rebecca Suzanne Howell on Feb. 4, 1982.

Authorities said she was abducted from a coin laundry in Jacksonville and raped before being strangled and dumped in Tallasseehatchee Creek.

In lifting the stay, the 11th Circuit ruling said it did not make any finding on "the relative merits of Callahan's constitutional claim because we conclude the claim is barred by the statue of limitations."

Judges Gerald Tjoflat and Susan Black, forming the majority, said the two-year time deadline began on July 31, 2002, when Callahan selected lethal injection as the method by which he would be put to death. They said he waited more than two years after the deadline expired to challenge lethal injection.

In dissent, Judge Charles Wilson said the time period to file a challenge does not begin "until the prisoner knows or has reason to know the facts giving rise to his claim and the prisoner's execution becomes imminent."

Wilson said the majority's approach "requires a death-sentenced prisoner to file a method-of-execution claim years before his execution is to take place, during which time the challenged protocol could be materially changed."

In his Dec. 14 order, Watkins wrote that the public interest would not be served by an unconstitutional execution, and Callahan's constitutional challenge should be resolved first. The judge said it would be "a waste of judicial resources" to hold a trial on Callahan's suit before the U.S. Supreme Court rules in the Kentucky case.

The state attorney general's office had opposed a stay and appealed to the 11th Circuit.

On Dec. 5, the Supreme Court stopped the execution of another Alabama death row inmate, Tommy Arthur, one day before he was scheduled to die by lethal injection at Holman prison. That stay also stemmed from the pending Kentucky case.

Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Clinton and a one-time aide to Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy, has been in the House of Representatives for all seven of Bush's State of the Union speeches.

On three occasions he was the only justice to cross the street from the court to the Capitol. In addition, Breyer also was the only justice at Bush's first speech to Congress in 2001, a couple months after the justices voted 5-4 to stop Florida's ballot recount and ensure Bush's presidency. Breyer had opposed halting the recount.

Breyer was joined Monday by Chief Justice John Roberts and justices Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy.

Roberts and Alito, Bush's two court appointees, have attended all three speeches since joining the court.

The last time Breyer missed the State of the Union was in 2000, in Clinton's last year in office. He had the flu.

That speech was the only time in recent memory when no justice was present, other than in 1986, when the speech was rescheduled because of the explosion of the Challenger shuttle.

Justices typically have said little about why they do or don't attend the speech. One exception is Justice Antonin Scalia, who hasn't gone in at least nine years.

Scalia, commenting in 2000, said the speech has become increasingly partisan — a potential problem for justices who customarily refrain from applauding anything even remotely political.

"One side will clap for this, and then the other side will clap for that," Scalia said. "And you know, we sit there like bumps on a log."

___

Put the second woman on the Supreme Court together with the first woman on Great Britain's highest court and what do you get? A conversation about bathrooms, of course.

"Everybody's got a bathroom story, haven't they?" said Lady Brenda Hale, the first woman Law Lord, at a recent forum at Georgetown University's law school with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Ginsburg recalled that when she joined the court in 1993, court workers altered the woman's bathroom adjacent to the room where the justices put on their robes to make it as large as the men's room. But it took a letter from advice columnist Dear Abby to get the court to change its tradition and open public women's bathrooms before 9 a.m., she said.

Sandra Day O'Connor, named to the Supreme Court in 1981, "had taken care of most of the irrationalities before I got there," Ginsburg said.

Hale told her own tale of being informed there was no women's restroom at the Privy Council, the final appeals court for the British empire.

The trailblazing judges also discussed recent changes in England that include renaming the high court the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, moving the court from Parliament to its own building and instituting mandatory retirement at 75.

Hale, also known as the Baroness Hale of Richmond, said the age limit was a response to colleagues "who went on long beyond it was sensible for them to go on, but were not sufficiently incompetent to be removed."

Ginsburg noted with relief that there is no retirement age for U.S. judges. She will turn 75 in March.

Two Feathers Elk and Bison Ranch in McMinville, Tenn., and the North American Deer Farmers Association are asking a federal judge to declare Kentucky's law unconstitutional, arguing that it illegally restricts interstate commerce.

"We don't believe they are interpreting the law properly," said Shawn Schafer, executive director of the deer farmers association, an 800-member group based in Lake City, Minn.

The farm and the group have sued Jonathan Gassett, the commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, and Karen J. Alexy, division director of wildlife for the department, on Friday in U.S. District Court in Lexington.

Phone calls to Gassett and Alexy after 5 p.m. Friday were not immediately returned.

But Morgain Sprague, general counsel for the fish and wildlife department, has sent the attorney for Two Feathers ranch a letter warning that any animals confiscated in Kentucky would be destroyed. He said the law is Constitutional and is being interpreted correctly.

"Your clients are free to use the interstates surrounding the Commonwealth of Kentucky to import cervids into Tennessee," Sprague wrote.

Kentucky state law bans the importation of elk and deer to protect the state's elk and white-tailed deer herds from chronic wasting disease. State officials have enforced the law to prohibit anyone from bringing deer or elk across state lines, even if the animals are destined for another state.

Violating the law is a felony, punishable by up to $10,000 in fines and five years in prison.

That has posed problems for Two Feathers ranch, which wants to ship animals to and from Kansas and pass through Kentucky on the interstate, Schafer said. The ranch applied to Kentucky for permits to transport the animals across state lines but was refused, Schafer said.

But Schafer said he believes the ban violates the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The Kentucky law is also discriminatory because it allows deer and elk farmers in the state to move their animals around, he said.

Schafer said Kentucky is the only state his group knows of that interprets the law to ban deer and elk from even crossing state lines.

"When I take a load of horses down to Florida, I don't have to call ahead and check with all the states in between to make sure it's OK to drive through," Schafer said.

In September, Wildlife and Fisheries agents arrested Timothy Cory Looper of Livingston, Tenn., as he passed west of Paducah with a load of elk and deer. The animals were destined for a hunting lodge in Tennessee, but the state destroyed the animals.

Looper was charged with six felony counts of illegally importing elk and deer into Kentucky. His case is pending.

Circuit Judge John B. Hagler of Cleveland, Tenn., resigned last month after the local prosecutor, an investigator and the Chattanooga Times Free Press asked him about the tape he had recorded years earlier.

The newspaper, The Associated Press and other news organizations had asked that the tape be released, but Hamilton County Chancery Court Judge Frank Brown ruled Thursday that it is not a public record and should be returned to Hagler.

"Private documents do not become public just because someone provides them to a law enforcement official," the judge said in the ruling.

Hagler's attorney, Roger Jenne, said that while Hagler was "extremely grateful" for the ruling, investigators should "get back and investigate what is really behind" the leak of the tape's existence.

Chattanooga police investigated the tape in 2005, after a secretary who had just been fired by Hagler turned it over. She said she found the recording of the judge's voice on a tape that also contained legal dictation.

Few details of the tape's content have been made public, but police testified during a court hearing that it was disturbing and sounded like someone being tortured.

They said they initially thought the tape might be linked to the unsolved 1997 shooting death of an Episcopal priest, the Rev. Charles Martin "Marty" Davis, 35, in Chattanooga. But Brown said in the decision Thursday that there was no apparent link.

Brown disagreed with Chattanooga police who said the tape was needed in their records as exculpatory evidence in the Davis killing. He said it was no more related to the Davis case than "books written about Charles Manson."

About two years after the investigation ended, the tape made its way to the prosecutor in Hagler's district, District Attorney Steve Bebb. After the Times Free Press learned about the recording from an unidentified source in December, Hagler confirmed it and resigned.

Bebb said in December that the tape "would disturb any human being who heard it," and that he sent a copy to the state Court of the Judiciary, which handles complaints against judges. The court, however, has no jurisdiction because Hagler resigned, a court spokeswoman said.

Hagler, who had been a circuit judge in Cleveland since 1990, has said that he did nothing wrong but that the recording had caused great embarrassment to friends, relatives and the courts. He strongly suggested the leak was committed by someone with a grudge against him, perhaps someone he ruled against.

In a statement issued last month, he said describing the recording as "graphic fantasies" was "accurate and sufficient ... and all any decent person would want to hear of it."

Brown said the newspaper and Chattanooga officials who had previously agreed to release the recording would have 30 days to contest it. The Times Free Press has not decided whether to do so, said its publisher and executive editor, Tom Griscom.

Jenne said there is a question as to whether someone "leaked this information in retaliation for decisions he has made in the past."

"Find out who the culprit is," he said

Jenne said release of the tape by anyone other than the parties in the case would bring a "pretty significant lawsuit."

The two-year study by the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission is the first to propose broad changes after the devastating bridge collapse in Minneapolis last August shone a spotlight on the deteriorating state of the nation's infrastructure. Calling for immediate action, the congressionally created panel warned that "applying patches" is no longer acceptable. It said the nation risks tens of thousands of highway casualties each year and millions of dollars lost in economic growth.

"The crisis is now," the report said.

The 68-page compilation of findings and recommendations, which were supported by nine of the 12 members on the commission, is expected to re-ignite congressional and political debate over raising gasoline taxes. The gas tax has not been increased since 1993, and recent efforts by Congress to increase it have faltered, over the objections of the Bush administration.

The commission was expected to present its findings Thursday to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and to a Senate panel later this month, but House Republican leaders quickly said they would oppose a tax hike.

"A dramatic increase in the gas tax does not stand a snowball's chance in hell of passing Congress," said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., the top Republican on the House Transportation panel.

In a 10-page dissent, the commission's chairwoman, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, and two other members agreed with several aspects of the report but sharply criticized the proposal for higher gasoline taxes. She and the two commissioners are calling instead for sole reliance on tolls and private investment, which Peters said would avoid sending millions of dollars of new tax revenue to Washington that end up as congressional pork. Department spokesman for said the three commissioners opted not to appear at the news conference to avoid a public display of internal division.

Under the proposal, the current tax of 18.4 cents per gallon would be increased by 5 cents to 8 cents annually for five years and then indexed to inflation afterward to help fix the infrastructure, expand public transit and highways as well as broaden railway and rural access. The increase is designed to take effect in 2009, after President Bush leaves office.

Other sources of revenue could come from tolls, peak-hour "congestion pricing" on highways, freight fees and ticket taxes for passenger rail improvements, the report said.

"A failure to act will be catastrophic to this nation," said Jack Schenendorf, the commission's vice chairman. He contended the tax increase would amount to "less than a cost of a candy bar and a fifth of the cost of a cafe latte" for the average U.S. motorist.

"We saw what happened with Katrina," he said, referring to the 2005 hurricane which overwhelmed aging levees. "We don't want to see the transportation system to see the same fate of the New Orleans levees."

Commissioner Paul Weyrich, a Republican appointee to the commission and chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, said he is philosophically opposed to higher taxes but decided to support it this time in light of the growing transportation problems.

The recommendations, if implemented, are expected to cost $225 billion each year for the next 50 years:

The commission, established by Congress in 2005, also called for the country to rebuild and expand its rail network to meet a growing demand for alternatives to congested highways and to promote partnerships between the public and private sectors at U.S. ports. Its report comes as state governments and several business groups call on Washington to raise gas taxes to pay for substantial transportation improvements. The Minneapolis bridge collapse, which killed 13 people and injured about 100, also drew new calls for additional spending.

"The time is now to work together to find a solution to this complex problem," said John Engler, president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, which is open to a tax increase but isn't formally supporting it. "The U.S. will soon be facing a competitive disadvantage if we don't develop a national plan to improve the quality of our infrastructure system."

The court ruled against investors who alleged that two suppliers colluded with Charter Communications Inc. to deceive Charter's stockholders and inflate the price of the cable TV company's stock.

Charter investors do not have the right to sue because they did not rely on the deceptive acts of Charter's suppliers, said the majority opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Kennedy pointed to the Securities and Exchange Commission as a protector of investors in similar cases and that the regulatory agency has used its enforcement power to collect more than $10 billion over the past five years.

The decision is likely to have an impact on a similar class-action lawsuit by shareholders who invested in scandal-ridden Enron Corp.

Investors in Enron, once the nation's seventh-largest company, are seeking more than $30 billion from Wall Street investment banks, alleging they schemed with Enron to hide its financial problems.

In the Supreme Court, the lawsuit against Charter's suppliers has been closely watched by business and industry, which argued that an adverse ruling would clear the way for a flood of lawsuits.

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said the court is conducting a continuing campaign to undercut investor lawsuits.

A liberal Supreme Court in 1971 endorsed investor lawsuits under antifraud provisions of securities law at issue in the current lawsuit. In 1994, a more conservative Supreme Court imposed limits on such lawsuits, prohibiting cases against third parties for aiding and abetting a company's misstatements. The Republican-controlled Congress enacted the restrictions into law the next year.

In a scheme allegedly designed to inflate the cable TV company's revenue picture, Charter got Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta to buy advertising with money that Charter provided. Charter supplied the funds by paying a $20 premium on each of hundreds of thousands of cable TV set-top boxes, for a total of $17 million. The amount of the overpayments equaled the amount the two suppliers paid for the ads.

Charter reported the advertising payments as revenue, a step that helped Charter meet Wall Street's expectations for the fourth quarter of 2000.

Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta allegedly backdated the contracts for the set-top boxes to make the advertising and the set-top boxes transactions appear unrelated. Scientific-Atlanta allegedly submitted documentation to Charter attributing the price increase to increased manufacturing expenses.

Justice Stephen Breyer disqualified himself from the case because he owns stock in Cisco Systems Inc., which now owns Scientific-Atlanta.