Countries party to a global anti-corruption treaty to see how they’re living up to their obligations, agreed country reps from 142 countries last week when they met in Qatar to put some teeth into the four-year-old UN Convention against Corruption. The convention has been seen as a useful tool in fighting worldwide graft because of it worldwide reach and focus on practical methods to stop public assets from being siphoned off to money laundering networks or financial secrecy jurisdictions. Under the new agreement, UN inspectors will be able to look at the books of countries that have signed the convention.

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: