Tue: Is the Bill Coming Due for No Bills?

The Long Reach of Putin

The bullet-riddled body of a Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine last year has been found in a town in southern Spain, according to Spanish and Ukrainian media.

Spain’s EFE news agency, in a report on Monday, said Maksim Kuzminov’s body was found in an underground garage on February 13 in the town of Villajoyosa, situated near Alicante in southern Spain.

“This traitor and criminal became a moral corpse at the very moment when he planned his dirty and terrible crime,” said Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, on Tuesday.

He did not confirm or deny any Russian involvement in the former pilot’s death.

“In Russia, it is customary to speak either good of the dead or nothing at all,” Naryshkin said, according to Russian state media.

Kuzminov, who had landed in Ukraine with his Mi-8 helicopter last August, had been living in Spain with a Ukrainian passport under a different name, EFE reported.

This Idiot is No Walter White

A New York man who ran a "Breaking Bad"-style drug lab inadvertently turned himself in when he called police to report a burglary, prosecutors said.

Matthew Leshinsky, 23, of Farmingville, pleaded guilty Thursday to two counts of third-degree unlawful manufacture of methamphetamine and other charges for running an illicit drug lab in Long Island, according to a news release from the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office.

Leshinsky had called 911 to report a burglary at his purported business, Quantitative Laboratories LLC in Ronkonkoma, at 3:30 a.m. June 7.

When Suffolk County police arrived, they found broken glass at the entrance to the lab and later discovered what appeared to be "a clandestine laboratory" that made methamphetamine and dimethyltryptamine, a hallucinogenic substance, as well as other substances, prosecutors said in the release.

A search warrant led to the discovery of over 100 items of laboratory equipment, chemical reagents and solvents used to manufacture and produce meth, officials said.

Authorities also recovered $40,000 in cash, ecstasy, over three ounces of methamphetamine and more than 625,000 milligrams of pure ketamine. They also found over 20 plastic 55-gallon drums containing Gamma-butyrolactone, a chemical similar to Gamma hydroxybutyric acid, which is referred to as the "date rape drug," prosecutors said.

More Evidence thtat Bibi Wanted Hamas Around 

Udi Levy has told BBC Panorama he advised Benjamin Netanyahu to target Hamas's finances.

He believes this would have hampered the group's military build-up, but says the intelligence was not acted upon.

The Israeli prime minister's office has not responded to the allegations. [...]

Mr Levy - who was head of economic warfare in the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, until 2016 - says he told Mr Netanyahu many times that Israel had the means to crush Hamas, which controls Gaza, "by using only financial tools".

Mr Levy says he never got a response to his proposal from Mr Netanyahu. [...]

One specific funding stream, which Mr Levy says he raised with Mr Netanyahu in 2014, was an alleged multi-million-dollar investment portfolio which Israeli intelligence said was controlled by Hamas and managed out of Turkey.

An End To the Worst Partisan Gerrymander

Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers signed new legislative district maps into law on Monday that he proposed and that the Republicans who control the Legislature passed to avoid having the liberal-controlled state Supreme Court draw the lines.

Democrats hailed the signing as a major political victory in the swing state where the Legislature has been firmly under Republican control for more than a decade, even as Democrats have won 14 of the past 17 statewide elections.

Democrats are almost certain to gain seats in the state Assembly and state Senate under the new maps, which be in place for the November election. Republicans have been operating since 2011 under maps they drew that were recognized as among the most gerrymandered in the country.

Democrats tried unsuccessfully for more than a decade to overturn the Republican-drawn maps. But it wasn’t until control of the state Supreme Court flipped in August after the election of liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz that Democrats found a winning formula.

They filed a lawsuit the day after Protasiewicz joined the court. Republicans argued that Protasiewicz shouldn’t hear the lawsuit because she said during her campaign that the GOP-drawn maps were “rigged” and “unfair.” But she did not recuse herself.

Protasiewicz ended up providing the deciding fourth vote in a December ruling that declared the current maps to be unconstitutional because not all of the districts were contiguous, meaning some areas were geographically disconnected from the rest of the district. The court said it would draw the lines if the Legislature couldn’t pass maps that Evers would sign.

These Desperados May Not Have a Peaceful Easy Feeling

n the mid-1970s, the Eagles were working on a spooky, cryptic new song.

On a lined yellow pad, Don Henley, with input from band co-founder Glenn Frey, jotted thoughts about “a dark desert highway" and “a lovely place” with a luxurious surface and ominous undertones. And something on ice, perhaps caviar or Taittinger — or pink Champagne?

The song, “Hotel California,” became one of rock's most indelible singles. And nearly a half-century later, those handwritten pages of lyrics-in-the-making have become the center of an unusual criminal trial set to open Wednesday.

Rare-book dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski are charged with conspiring to own and try to sell manuscripts of “Hotel California” and other Eagles hits without the right to do so.

The three have pleaded not guilty, and their lawyers have said the men committed no crime with the papers, which they acquired via a writer who'd worked with the Eagles. But the Manhattan district attorney’s office says the defendants connived to obscure the documents’ disputed ownership, despite knowing that Henley said the pages were stolen.

Clashes over valuable collectibles abound, but criminal trials like this are rare. Many fights are resolved in private, in lawsuits or with agreements to return the items.

“If you can avoid a prosecution by handing over the thing, most people just hand it over," said Travis McDade, a University of Illinois law professor who studies rare document disputes.

Of course, the case of the Eagles manuscripts is distinctive in other ways, too.

The prosecutors' star witness is indeed that: Henley is expected to testify between Eagles tour stops. The non-jury trial could offer a peek into the band's creative process and life in the fast lane of '70s stardom.

Lockbit?  Lock 'Em Up!!

Acoalition of international law enforcement agencies has disrupted one of the most destructive strains of ransomware in recent history, Lockbit, which cybercriminals frequently use to attack American hospitals and schools.

In one of the largest cybercrime takedowns to date, agencies from the United States, United Kingdom and 12 other countries dismantled Lockbit’s infrastructure and replaced its dark web site with a list of agency press releases and resources for victims.

Brett Leatherman, deputy assistant director of the FBI Cyber Division, said in a press conference Tuesday that the takedown was “several years in the making.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a YouTube video Tuesday that the action against Lockbit’s purveyors was “taking away the keys to their criminal operation.”

Ransomware is a type of cybercrime in which hackers use malicious software to encrypt a network of computers, usually belonging to a business or critical service, and demand a cryptocurrency payment for a promise to fix the problem. Such attacks routinely cripple operations at American hospitals, public schools, businesses and police departments.

The issue has become an epidemic, with victims sending their attackers a record $1 billion last year.

While the cybercrime underworld is littered with ransomware strains, Lockbit has been the most prolific in recent years, in part because its developers offer it to practically any would-be cybercriminal, said Allan Liska, a ransomware analyst at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

“Anyone who pays to join is accepted with little or no vetting,” he said. That lack of scruples helps explain why it’s so frequently used to hack hospitals, he said.

Global law enforcement takes down ransomware group that targeted US hospitals, schools