The suit likely will not affect tuition rates this fall, but if it's successful, it could lead to a rise in the cost of a college education in Florida, where tuition is among the lowest in the country.
Established in 2003 with a constitutional amendment approved by Florida voters, the Board of Governors was given "exclusive power to operate, regulate, control, and manage" the overall state university system.

A state law allowing the Legislature to control tuition is therefor unconstitutional, the complaint states.

"They are violating the will of the people of Florida," Graham said during a conference call with reporters Friday morning. "(The Board of Governors) has a constitutional responsibility."

However, Senate President Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, who, along with House Speaker Marco Rubio, R-West Miami, is named as a defendant in the suit, fired back. He called it "nothing more than an attempt to get unbridled tuition increases."

"God help our students if they win," Pruitt said in a statement. "I don't think voters were trying to turn the Board of Governors into the fourth branch of government."

None of the plaintiffs sit on the policy-making board, but several are university trustees and professors.

One of them, FAU marketing professor Eric Shaw, said university resources have become increasingly stretched in recent years as student enrollment increases.

More money is needed, either from the state or students, to provide quality higher education in Florida, where low tuition has led to high faculty-to-student ratios, Shaw said.

"Classes sizes get larger, faculty teach more and that cuts into their research time," he said. "But mostly you don't have as much contact with students."

Although board members would not comment on the lawsuit Friday, Shaw said he expects them to join the plaintiffs.

The board will take up the issue at a public meeting Tuesday at the University of Central Florida, said Bill Edmonds, board spokesman.

Crist's spokesman said the governor would need to review the lawsuit before commenting.

Meanwhile, Graham said the 20-page lawsuit, filed in Leon County Circuit Court in Tallahassee, has been in the works for a while but was pushed into court now because of the recent tuition increase freeze, which has universities scrambling to tighten their budgets.

"The legislature not only provides taxpayer money but decides what the student contribution will be," he said. "It does it in a way that it makes it almost impossible to have effective management of the university system."

"We take these things very seriously," said FBI spokesman Bill Carter, who added, "we have no specific and credible information about a credible threat to Goldman Sachs other than these letters."

The letters were postmarked late June from New York and were handwritten in red ink on loose-leaf paper.

"We are working closely with the law enforcement authorities, who tell us they don't believe the threat to be very credible," Goldman Sachs said in a statement today. "We have a broad range of security measures in place to counter all likely threats and we're monitoring the situation closely."

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette received the letter Monday, said Bobby Wells, the newspaper's administrative assistant, and the FBI and local police department have since picked up the letter.

The Star-Ledger reported that it received one of the letters, postmarked June 27. The letter was addressed to the news department and was turned over to the FBI, according to the newspaper.

Goldman is a powerhouse in investment banking, with $37 billion in revenue last year and a profit of $9.5 billion. It hands out the biggest paychecks on Wall Street, averaging $623,418 per employee last year with individual rainmakers raking in up to $50 million, according to U.S. regulatory filings.

Goldman Sachs sent the following internal memo to its employees:

"The firm is aware that a number of local newspapers in a few places in the U.S. have received anonymous letters threatening the firm. We take any threat to the safety of our people and our business very seriously. The Office of Global Security has consulted the FBI and other relevant authorities. Authorities have informed us that they believe the threat to be of low credibility. Nevertheless, they have mounted an active investigation to try to determine the source of the letters. We have a broad range of security measures in place to counter all likely threats and we continue to monitor this situation closely. We do not view this situation as a cause for concern."

A source at Goldman who asked not to be named said that the firm didn't think the letters were credible and that officials were satisfied with the many security provisions in place, especially in New York.

But the American Civil Liberties Union, along with groups and attorneys based in Michigan, filed a lawsuit in Detroit in January 2006 saying that the government's surveillance program was unconstitutional and interfered with their jobs.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit ruled in favor of the plaintiffs last August. The U.S. Justice Department then appealed the case to the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court.

Kary Moss, head of the Michigan branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, said "it's a really unfortunate decision."

She said that one of the reasons the plaintiffs had difficulty proving they were being adversely affected was that the government has kept information about the wiretapping program a secret. Moss said they are considering appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Dawud Walid, head of the Michigan branch of the Council on American Islamic Relations, one of the co-plaintiffs, said: "It's a shame that the court overturned the decision... what the executive branch was doing was unconstitutional."

Three men have admitted using the internet to urge Muslims to wage holy war on non-believers, police said, in what is believed to the first prosecution of its kind in Britain.

Tariq Al-Daour, Younes Tsouli and Waseem Mughal had close links with Al-Qaeda in Iraq and thought there was a 'global conspiracy' to wipe out Islam, London's Woolwich Crown Court was told.

UAE-born Al-Daour, 21, admitted a charge of 'inciting another person to commit an act of terrorism wholly or partly outside the UK which would, if committed in England and Wales, constitute murder'.

Moroccan-born Tsouli, 23, and British-born Mughal, 24, admitted the same charge on Monday.

The guilty pleas came two months into their trial.

Al-Daour and Tsouli, who lived in west London, and Mughal, from Kent, in southeast England, also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud banks, credit card and charge card companies.

The trial was told the computer experts spent at least 12 months trying to encourage people to follow the extreme ideology of Osama bin Laden using email and radical websites.

Films of hostages and beheadings were found among their possessions, including footage of British contractor Ken Bigley, who was killed in Iraq in 2004; and US journalist Daniel Pearl, killed in Pakistan in 2002.

CDs containing instructions for making explosives and poisons were also found, with other documents giving advice on how to use a rocket-propelled grenade and how to make booby traps and a suicide vest.

Police also discovered online conversations in which Al-Dour talked of sponsoring terrorist attacks, becoming 'the new Osama' and justifying suicide bombings.

Chicago police are investigating whether three elderly patients, including two dead and the other in a coma, at the University of Chicago Medical Center were intentionally given insulin overdoses, according to media reports Wednesday.

Suspicions were raised after extremely high levels of insulin was found in a comatose hospital patient less than three weeks after a similar case.

"Right now we have not been able to determine criminal intent," said Chicago Police Department spokeswoman Monique Bond. "It's very early in the investigation."

On the other hand, the hospital spokesman John Easton said, "We haven't necessarily tied it to anyone. We don't know if it's medical error or product integrity or defective test results." "We just don't know yet."

All three patients were elderly women being treated in the same wing of the Hyde Park hospital, all were stricken between May 7 and June 5, and none had been prescribed insulin or was suffering from diabetes, Easton said.

According to experts, insulin is produced by the pancreas and controls blood sugar levels, which can cause serious complications including coma and death if they're too high or too low.

Insulin also is given as a medicine to treat diabetes and some other conditions that affect blood sugar control. A normal insulin level ranges from fewer than 10 to 50 micro international units per micro-liter.

The test found that two of the victims had insulin levels "thousands of times higher than normal levels," -- over 2,600. The third was not tested for insulin levels but was hypoglycemic at the time of her death, officials said.

Easton said the hospital has strengthened the security of its insulin storage procedures and increased oversight of how insulin is administered to patients, but that no staffs have been reassigned.

Doctors were alerted to the problem on June 6 when they first saw a high-insulin test result, Easton said. Test results for a second victim were seen on June 14. The hospital notified police after a June 22 staff "root cause" meeting at which internal investigators could not explain the deaths, Easton said.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been notified, Easton said, in case there were problems with the insulin itself.

The commutation, which drastically reduced Libby's punishment, is just short of a presidential pardon, which would have exonerated Libby and wiped the conviction from his record.

The key adviser to Cheney and an architect of the Iraq war, Libby was convicted March 6 in federal court. A jury found him guilty of lying to prosecutors who were trying to determine if top Bush administration officials leaked the identity of former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson -- purported retaliation for her husband's contention that the Bush administration twisted intelligence facts to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"I respect the jury's verdict," Bush said in a statement announcing his decision. "But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive."

While the president has the right to pardon convicted criminals and commute prison sentences, such actions are rare, and normally are taken after a thorough investigation by the Department of Justice. Bush, however, said in his statement that he made the decision personally.

The president noted that Libby's supporters believe the punishment does not fit the crime, while his critics point to the fact that he was convicted of perjury and obstructing justice in an open court. While both sides "have made important points, I have made my own evaluation," Bush said.

Democratic Party leaders, including several of the party's presidential candidates, were outraged, saying the commutation shows disrespect for the judicial system and smacks of a different legal standard for Bush's top aides.

In a statement issued last night, Senate majority leader Harry Reid called Bush's decision "disgraceful," adding that Libby's jury trial and conviction "was the one faint glimmer of accountability for White House efforts to manipulate intelligence and silence critics of the Iraq War. Now, even that small bit of justice has been undone."

But House Republican whip Roy Blunt applauded the decision, saying, "President Bush did the right thing today in commuting the prison term for Scooter Libby. The prison sentence was overly harsh and the punishment did not fit the crime. The sentence was based on charges that had nothing to do with the leak of the identity of a CIA operative."

Libby's lawyer, William Jeffress , said he was pleased by the president's decision. "The prison sentence was imminent, but obviously the conviction itself is a heavy blow to Scooter," he told the Associated Press.

The case against Libby, authorities say, stemmed from a White House decision to play hardball with critics who challenged their reasoning for the war. Cheney was particularly incensed at a New York Times opinion article by Joseph Wilson, Plame Wilson's husband, a retired ambassador who accused the administration of exaggerating the security threat in Iraq.

As the White House was preparing its case for war, the CIA asked Wilson, a retired ambassador who had served in Africa, in 2002 to check out reports that Niger had sent materials for a nuclear weapon to Iraq. Upon returning, Wilson told the CIA he found no evidence of such a transfer.

Nonetheless, Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union speech that the British government "has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

In July 2003, Wilson wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times stating that the intelligence the president cited in his speech had been "twisted" to exaggerate the Iraqi threat and convince Congress and the nation that war was necessary. According to evidence introduced during the trial, Cheney clipped the article and jotted a note on it: "did his wife send him on a junket?"

Shortly afterward, Plame Wilson's name was leaked as a CIA operative, appearing first in a column written by Robert Novak. A federal investigation was launched, and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald interviewed many administration insiders, including Libby, as well as several influential Washington journalists. The investigation focused on whether Plame Wilson's name was leaked as retaliation for her husband's article and to undercut his credibility.

Reached by telephone yesterday, Wilson said he believes Bush's commutation of Libby's sentence raises further suspicion about what role the president, vice president, and other top aides may have had in revealing his wife's identity.

Fitzgerald maintained after Libby's verdict that his false testimony and obstruction may have prevented a case from being brought for the original act of leaking the identity of an undercover intelligence operative.

Bush "has effectively guaranteed that there is no incentive for Mr. Libby to tell the truth about what really happened," Wilson said, adding that his wife "is just as outraged as I am."

Bush's action came at a time when many Democrats and some Republicans have called for a continued investigation into how the president went to war. Some Democrats had hoped the investigation that led to Libby's conviction would unearth fresh information about how the administration manipulated journalists and the Congress with misleading information about the allegation that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Analysts said Bush's decision demonstrated the continuing influence of Cheney, who issued a statement after the sentencing that he was "deeply saddened" by the 30-month term. "Speaking as friends, we hope that our system will return a final result consistent with what we know of this fine man," Cheney and his wife, Lynne, said at the time.

While there has been considerable speculation that Bush would commute Libby's sentence or pardon him, the swiftness of the decision surprised many political observers because it came before Libby exhausted his legal appeals.

"I'm surprised it was this quick. There were other appeals that could have been taken," said University of Richmond School of Law professor Carl Tobias. Tobias noted that the three-judge panel is composed of two Republican appointees and one Democratic appointee, which indicates Libby might have had a tough time winning an appeal. "They were unanimous and these were not what anybody would consider left-wing judges," Tobias said.

During the sentencing hearing, Fitzgerald urged US District Judge Reggie Walton "to make clear and loud that truth matters and one's station in life does not." Walton, in announcing the sentence, said "it is important we expect and demand a lot from people who put themselves in those positions. Mr. Libby failed to meet the bar."