WASHINGTON

Supreme Court turns down NSA-phone monitoring suit

The Supreme Court has ended a 6-year-old class-action lawsuit against the nation’s telecommunications carriers for secretly helping the National Security Agency monitor phone calls and emails coming into and out of this country.

The suit was dealt a death blow in 2008 when Congress granted retroactive immunity to people or companies aiding U.S. intelligence agents.

Without comment, the justices turned down appeals from civil liberties advocates who contended this mass surveillance was unconstitutional and illegal.

This month the justices are set to hear a separate case to decide whether NSA officials can be sued for authorizing this allegedly unconstitutional mass wiretapping.

The suit against the telecom companies was triggered when Mark Klein, a retired AT&T engineer in San Francisco, revealed that the company had allowed NSA agents to tap into its switching devices.

MOBILE, Ala.

Naked student who was shot dead had taken LSD

A nude University of South Alabama freshman had taken LSD and assaulted others before he chased the campus police officer who fatally shot him, authorities said Tuesday, though the student wasn’t armed and didn’t touch the officer.

Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran said at a news conference that 18-year-old Gil Collar took the potent hallucinogen during a music festival Saturday before assaulting two people in vehicles and attempting to bite a woman’s arm.

Authorities said Collar then went to the campus police headquarters, where he was shot by university police officer Trevis Austin. Austin is on leave while investigators review the shooting.

Video taken by a surveillance camera showed Collar nude and covered in sweat as he pursued the retreating officer more than 50 feet outside the building, Cochran said. Collar got within 5 feet of Austin and the officer fired once, striking the student in the chest, Cochran said. An attorney for Collar’s family questioned why the officer wasn’t able to use nonfatal means to subdue him.

The sheriff said it was unclear whether the officer could have avoided the shooting even if he had a non-lethal weapon.

SEATTLE

Dying woman on last flight upset over security pat-down

A Michigan woman dying of leukemia hopes her embarrassing experience at a Seattle airport changes the way the Transportation Security Administration treats travelers with medical conditions. Michelle Dunaj, 34, was making what she expects will be the last trip of her life on Oct. 2 as she departed for Hawaii.

The Roseville, Mich., woman thought she had prepared by calling the airline ahead of time, asking for a wheelchair, carrying documentation for her feeding tubes and making sure she had prescriptions for all her medications, including five bags of saline solution. But Dunaj said she received a full pat-down in the security line at Sea-Tac Airport and had to lift her shirt and pull back bandages so agents could get a good look. She said everyone else in line got a look, too. Dunaj said a female agent performed the pat-down and asked her to lift up her shirt after feeling the tubes going into Dunaj’s chest and abdomen. Dunaj said her suggestion for a more private pat-down was dismissed.

“I asked them if they thought that was an appropriate location, and they told me that everything was fine,” she said.

She said another agent punctured one of the saline bags she was carrying, ruining it.

– From news service reports