A Florida businessman who once factored in the Smurfs cartoon empire lost a bid Tuesday to withdraw his guilty plea in an $11 million shakedown plot targeting his financier son-in-law.

With that, Stuart R. Ross was sentenced to the five years' probation he was promised when he pleaded guilty in August to attempted grand larceny. But his lawyer said he now plans to ask an appeals court to let Ross take back the plea, which he says Ross entered while pressured by medical problems.

In his plea, Ross admitted threatening to destroy son-in-law David S. Blitzer's professional reputation if not paid $5.5 million. Ross also acknowledged offering to give up any rights to see his grandchildren for another $5.5 million.

Ross, 74, agreed to plead guilty while jailed on $200,000 bond awaiting trial. He was contending with pneumonia, cancer and other health woes that weren't getting adequate care behind bars, and he took the plea deal to gain his freedom, lawyer Matthew Myers said outside court Tuesday.

"He was under tremendous duress," Myers said. "It's the only reason why he pled."

But state Supreme Court Justice Bonnie Wittner rebuffed Ross' request to withdraw his plea. Defendants pleading guilty are routinely warned they can't revisit the decision and are asked to acknowledge they are indeed guilty.

A McAllen doctor and his attorney wife face arraignment Jan. 4 in Portland, Ore., after being charged with secretly sending more than $1.8 million to Iran in funds meant for a children's charity.

Dr. Hossein Lahiji, 47, and Najmeh Vahid, 35, were arrested Tuesday by the FBI in San Antonio on fraud and conspiracy charges related to violating the U.S. trade embargo on Iran, their homeland, the San Antonio Express-News reported Wednesday. The two were released on unsecured bonds.

The pair deny the allegations, linked to funds since 2001, and say the federal indictment announced last week in Portland is inaccurate.

Lahiji, a urologist, told the Express-News that the indictment places them in certain geographic areas when they were elsewhere.

"There are a lot of inconsistencies in (the indictment), and we hope to prove our innocence," said Vahid, a lawyer whose practice is based in San Antonio.

The charity, Child Foundation, and its leader, Mehrdad Yasrebi, struck a plea deal with prosecutors in Oregon to avoid formal indictment. Yasrebi admitted he funneled money that was meant for food and other assistance to a cousin and to a bank controlled by the Iranian government.

The Texas couple is accused of working through Iranian corporations and banks in Switzerland and Dubai. The indictment charges the couple with conspiring to defraud the government and conspiring to launder money by purporting to transfer charitable donations to Iran, while actually keeping control of the money. If convicted, they face up to 20 years in prison.

A contractor doing business with the Army has pleaded guilty to providing an illegal gratuity to the former director of construction at Fort Carson.

Wendel P. Torres, a registered agent with a Colorado Springs-based company, faces up to two years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Torres pleaded guilty to a charge that in May 2007 he delivered $3,500 in construction materials to a home owned by William T. Armstrong, former construction division chief at the posts' Directorate of Contracting.

Armstrong was sentenced earlier this month to a year of probation and fined $5,000 for failing to disclose the illegal gratuity.

The charges are part of the Justice Department's ongoing investigation into contracts awarded at Fort Carson.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the U.S. government to pay more than $2.5 million in attorney fees and damages after he concluded investigators wiretapped the phones of a suspected terrorist organization without a warrant.

U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker said the attorneys for the Ashland, Ore., chapter of the now-defunct Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation should receive $2.5 million for waging its nearly five-year legal challenge to the Bush administration's so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Walker also awarded $20,400 each to Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor, two of the foundation's Washington D.C.-based lawyers. They had their phone conversations with Al-Haramain principals monitored, the judge said.

"The system worked," Ghafoor said. "And we really hope that the government lets this stand and writes it off as a bad program from a previous administration.."

Earlier this year the judge found that investigators illegally intercepted the electronic communications without warrants. Government lawyers have refused throughout the litigation to disclose whether investigators eavesdropped, "although the fact of such surveillance is not in doubt," the judge concluded.

The Department of Justice lawyer who defended the program in court for the Bush administration and then the Obama administration, Anthony J. Coppolino, didn't return a phone call late Tuesday.

The judge refused to award any punitive damages, saying the investigators didn't act in bad faith in following the guidelines of the controversial program exposed by the New York Times in 2005.

A Corpus Christi-area man has pleaded guilty to two weapons charges and will forfeit a grenade launcher and more than 11,000 rounds of ammunition.

Jeremy Charles Davenport of Odem will be sentenced March 9, 2011, and faces up to 10 years in prison on each count.

Davenport on Tuesday pleaded guilty to being in possession of an improvised explosive device when he was arrested Sept. 29 by Corpus Christi police in a domestic disturbance investigation. Davenport also pleaded guilty to being a drug user in possession of 19 firearms, including a machine gun.

Federal law bars the possession of firearms while being an unlawful user of a controlled substance. Davenport, who says he was using cocaine at the time of the incident, remains in custody.

The House has passed a sweeping bill aimed at making food safer following recent contaminations in peanuts, eggs and produce, sending it to President Barack Obama for his signature.

The legislation passed Tuesday would give the government broad new powers to inspect processing plants, order recalls and impose stricter standards for imported foods. The $1.4 billion bill would also require larger farms and food manufacturers to prepare detailed food safety plans and tell the Food and Drug Administration how they are working to keep their food safe at different stages of production.

Praising the House, FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the bill will give her agency new tools to make substantial improvements in food safety.

"This law makes everyone responsible and accountable at each step in today's global food supply chain," Hamburg said.

The food safety bill has faced several false starts since the House first passed it in July 2009. It stalled in the Senate for more than a year as small farms objected to the increased oversight and conservatives complained about the cost. Most recently, the Senate passed the bill in November with tax provisions that were supposed to originate in the House under the Constitution, threatening completion of the bill.

House leaders tried to revive the bill by including it in year-end budget legislation, but that legislation later died when Senate Republicans objected to adding food safety and other unrelated measures to the giant spending bill. Democratic leader Harry Reid gave the legislation a last-minute, surprise reprieve Sunday by working with Republicans to pass a stand-alone food safety bill by voice vote, sending it to the House. The House passed it 215-144, sending it to Obama just under the wire as Congress prepares to adjourn for the year.