Congress renews surveillance law

Congress renews surveillance law

WASHINGTON

The Senate gave final congressional approval Friday to a bill renewing the government’s authority to monitor overseas phone calls and emails of suspected foreign spies and terrorists — but not Americans —without obtaining a court order for each intercept.

The classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act program was on the brink of expiring by year’s end. The 73-23 vote sent the bill to a supportive President Barack Obama, whose signature would keep the warrantless intercept program in operation for five more years.

Russia bans US adoptions

MOSCOW

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning the adoption of Russian orphans by U.S. families, the Kremlin announced Friday.

The measure widely was seen as retaliation for the Sergei Magnitsky Act passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama this month, which imposed sanctions on Russian officials involved in the death of an imprisoned lawyer in 2009 after he blew the whistle on a multimillion-dollar tax-refund scam purportedly orchestrated by tax inspectors and police officers.

‘Scarsdale Diet’ doctor killer dies

NEW HAVEN, Conn.

Jean Harris, the patrician girls’ school headmistress who spent 12 years in prison for the 1980 killing of her longtime lover, “Scarsdale Diet” doctor Herman Tarnower, in a case that rallied feminists and inspired television movies, has died. She was 89.

Harris died Sunday at an assisted-living facility in New Haven, her son, James Harris, said Friday.

She had claimed the shooting of Tarnower, 69, was an accident. Convicted of murder in 1981, Harris suffered two heart attacks while serving her sentence in the Bedford Hills women’s prison north of New York City. She was granted clemency by then-Gov. Mario Cuomo when she underwent heart-bypass surgery in December 1992 and was released on parole three weeks later.

ASPCA settles suit with Ringling Bros.

WASHINGTON

An animal-rights group will pay Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus $9.3 million to settle a lawsuit the circus filed after courts found that activists paid a former circus worker for his help in claiming the circus abused elephants.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said Friday it was not admitting any wrongdoing in settling the lawsuit. The New York-based animal rights group was one of several involved in a lawsuit filed in 2000 against the circus’s owner, Feld Entertainment Inc., claiming elephants were abused. Courts later found that the animal- rights activists had paid a former Ringling barn helper involved in the lawsuit at least $190,000, making him “essentially a paid plaintiff” who lacked credibility.

Chicago logs 500th homicide of 2012

CHICAGO

Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy says the city has logged its 500th homicide of the year.

McCarthy issued a statement Friday calling the milestone a “tragic number that is reflective of the gang violence and proliferation of illegal guns that have plagued some of our neighborhoods.”

Combined dispatches