Across the Nation

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales offered additional defenses of President Bush’s domestic spying program on Tuesday, as the administration tried to redefine the warrantless surveillance in a way that undermines critics.

Speaking to students at Georgetown University law school, Gonzales said a 15-day grace period allowing warrantless eavesdropping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act demonstrates that Congress knew such surveillance "would be essential in wartime.”

Gonzales was supplying legal arguments to the president’s comments Monday that the effort should be called a "terrorist surveillance program.”

Confronting Gonzales during his nearly half-hour speech were more than a dozen young people in the audience who turned their backs to him and held up for a banner for television cameras. The banner, loosely based on a Benjamin Franklin quote, read: "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”

Supreme Court steps in to block Florida execution

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court issued a last-minute stay late Tuesday to a Florida death row inmate who claimed he was mentally retarded and should not be executed for killing a police officer.

Florida prison officials had delayed the execution of Hill, who also wants to challenge the drugs that would be used.

It was not clear if the court’s intervention would only briefly delay Hill’s execution.

Justices were reviewing a pair of Hill appeals, and Justice Anthony Kennedy filed paperwork that said the execution should be delayed.

Earlier, Hill had lost appeals at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. He was scheduled to die at Florida State Prison for the Oct. 19, 1982, slaying of a Pensacola police officer and the wounding of his partner.<