Anniversaries ending with zeroes tend to prompt a good deal of news coverage, as illustrated by the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall on Nov. 9. Among the and foreign correspondents’ “ ” memories was a ” and that its justice systems has been hampered by the old guard.  Aviezer Tucker, a philosopher researching totalitarianism, said communism was more effective than other authoritarian orders, such as Spain's Franco, in eradicating dissent and destroying institutions that form the web of a democratic society.

And I thought that Morava was just . Morava was also the code name Serbian police used for their over the weekend. More than 2,000 police descended on southern Serbia’s heroin-trafficking towns of Vranje, Novi Pazar and Bujanovac, as well as other towns outside the south, and came up with hundreds of suspects, various drugs including heroin, stolen cars, weapons, ammunition and one suspect holding $52,000 in counterfeit bills. , according to a source.

The “Brainy Don,” Semion Mogilevich, known up to now as merely a shadowy controller of Eastern European gas pipelines, a launderer of money and a defrauder of investors for $150 million, . The US is offering up to $100,000 for information leading to the arrest of the Ukrainian-born Mogilevich. He is charged with more than 40 counts of racketeering, wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering and other crimes committed in dozens of countries. (Pssssst. He could still be in Moscow, since over an alleged tax evasion case there.)

Governments and private finance have gone after donors who have funded terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda, so , according to David Cohen, assistant treasury secretary for terrorist financing. He made his remarks to a money laundering conference in DC:

Yaponchik (“the little Japanese”), a Russian gangster,  , months after a sniper shot him several times in the stomach in Moscow at the end of July. of Yaponchik, otherwise known as Vyacheslav Ivankov. He was 69. Russian news agencies had said Ivankov was mediating between two rival criminal groups before he was shot from 70 metres as he left a Thai restaurant. His killer, who is still at large, fired from a car parked on the opposite side of a highway, investigators said.