The Distributed Denial of Secrets Twitter account has published links to terabytes of data identified as raw data from the Cayman National Bank and Trust; Phineas Fisher (previously), the public-interest hacker(s) behind the Hacking Team breach, is credited with the leak. Read the rest
Devin Nunes is such an idiot. Read the rest
A young girl snatched from her mother's arms on a Texas street was traced two days later to a nearby hotel, where cops busted down the door and arrested the kidnapper. Here's an Inside Edition segment showing the kidnapping, partially captured from a nearby video doorbell, and the hotel raid.
Seven months after an 8-year-old girl was kidnapped while walking with her mom in their Texas neighborhood, police released heart-stopping video of the moment officers busted into the suspect's hotel room and rescued her. Michael Webb, 51, kidnapped the 8-year-old girl on May 18 as she was walking with her mom in Fort Worth. As the distraught mom tried to fight him off, he was able to get the girl in his car and take off. She called 911 and police immediately went searching for the girl.
They bungled it once and almost bungled it again.
Acting on a tip, police in nearby Forest Hill searched Webb’s hotel room early the next day but didn’t find her. Two hours later, after getting another tip, Forest Hill and Fort Worth police responded. The girl was found hidden in a laundry basket.
The Forest Hill police chief fired a sergeant who expressed doubt about the tip that led to the second visit.
Webb was sentenced to life imprisonment on Federal kidnapping charges; jurors deliberated for 15 minutes. State charges of sexual assault of a child are yet to go to trial. Read the rest
Rembrandt's Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III has been stolen from the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London four times:
Between 14 August 1981 and 3 September 1981 the painting was taken from Dulwich Picture Gallery and retrieved when police arrested four men in a taxi who had the painting with them. A little under two years later a burglar smashed a skylight and descended through it into the art gallery, using a crowbar to remove the painting from the wall. The police arrived within three minutes but were too late to apprehend the thief. The painting was missing for three years, eventually being found on 8 October 1986 in a luggage rack at the train station of a British army garrison in Münster, Germany.
The other two times, the painting was found once underneath a bench in a graveyard in Streatham, and once on the back of a bicycle. Each time the painting has been returned anonymously with more than one person being charged for its disappearance.
The gallery is currently promoting an exhibit called Rembrandt's Light, which just earned a lot of free publicity:
On Wednesday, police thwarted an attempted robbery at the gallery:
Read the restAn intruder appears to have forced entry to the gallery and removed the two paintings, which were part of an exhibition.
Officers arrived minutes later and, following the search of the area, challenged an intruder and an officer gave chase.
The intruder then turned and used a canister to spray the officer in the face with an unknown substance.
Well this is awkward.
Donald Trump, a very normal and innocent President of the United States, just tweeted:
So they now convict Roger Stone of lying and want to jail him for many years to come. Well, what about Crooked Hillary, Comey, Strzok, Page, McCabe, Brennan, Clapper, Shifty Schiff, Ohr & Nellie, Steele & all of the others, including even Mueller himself? Didn’t they lie?....
LOL.
Lol you know everything you touch dies, right? https://t.co/PO2els1IWF
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) November 15, 2019
Who is next?
Roger Stone is the latest in a line of people around Trump who spent careers one step ahead of the law - until he became president, and now they're behind bars. Manafort, Cohen, Gates, now Stone. Who's next?
— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) November 15, 2019
PREVIOUSLY ON BOING BOING:
A coke stash hidden in the woods by suspected drug dealers was destroyed by boars, report police in Tuscany.
The drug stash was hidden in a forest area in the Valdichiana valley. The law enforcement probe, which spanned between September 2018 and March 2019, discovered one of the gang members was allegedly distributing drugs via a nightclub in Arezzo.
The suspects traded approximately two kilograms (4.4 pounds) of cocaine every month, which netted the gang the equivalent of between $90 and $120 per gram, Il Tirreno reported. An unknown number of boars allegedly dug up and destroyed the gang's packages, dispersing their contents in the woods.
It was not immediately known what happened to the curious animals.
Screenshot: Barry Young Read the rest
An Australian woman's creepy, violent ex-boyfriend hacked her phone using stalkerware, then used that, along with her car's VIN number, to hack the remote control app for her car (possibly Landrover's Incontrol app), which allowed him to track her location, stop and start her car, and adjust the car's temperature. Read the rest
Adolfo “Flaco” Mitchell, 34, owns a chain of taco restaurants in coastal Georgia. He's also been indicted for drug trafficking and conspiracy.
Read the restPolice say Mitchell, who owns multiple Flacos House restaurants, was having methamphetamine shipped to him to distribute throughout the Savannah area. They say Mitchell was also directing others to transport methamphetamine to other states, including Virginia.
Mitchell remains jailed Monday. It’s unclear if he has a lawyer.
A man was arrested off a flight by police Tuesday after allegedly grabbing another passenger's crotch and causing the captain to divert to the nearest airport after the incident. James Clayton Cholewinski-Boy was charged with abusive sexual contact.
The alleged victim, identified as "E.J." in the complaint, was seated between Cholewinski-Boy and her daughter. Shortly after takeoff, he began touching the woman's arm and she repeatedly pushed his hands away, according to the complaint. Cholewinski-Boy then "forcibly grabbed her by the crotch," the complaint said. The woman again pushed his hand away and demanded that he stop.
Photo: Tulsa P.D. Read the rest
Two then-employees of Twitter used their position to provide the Saudi government with information about its critics on the platform, say prosecutors, who have charged them with espionage. The men rifled through "thousands of private accounts seeking personal information" of use to the kingdom's security forces, reports NPR.
Read the restAhmad Abouammo, a U.S. citizen, was a media partnerships manager at Twitter who was not authorized to access Twitter users' private information. He allegedly did exactly that for which he received payments of up to $300,000 from a Saudi source identified in the complaint only as "Foreign Official-1." Abouammo also received a Hublot watch with a value of about $20,000. Abouammo is charged with acting as a foreign agent and falsifying records to obstruct a federal investigation. ...
Ali Alzabarah, a Saudi citizen worked at Twitter beginning in August 2013 as a "site reliability engineer." Between May 21, 2015, and November 18, 2015, Alzabarah, without authorization, accessed "the Twitter data of over 6,000 Twitter users, including at least 33 usernames for which Saudi Arabian law enforcement had submitted emergency disclosure requests to Twitter," the complaint said. Among the accounts he accessed were those belonging to well-known critics of the Saudi government.
Police in Los Angeles said on Tuesday they have recovered some $800,000 worth of stolen prints by the Scottish abstract expressionist and esotericist Benjamin Creme. Read the rest
I'm not sure where this video was shot but many commenters in Reddit say it took place in South America and was likely a kidnapping attempt. The video was taken by a security camera on a narrow residential street.
We see a car going into a garage. As the garage starts closing another car drives up and four professional looking thugs jump and out slide under the door before it fully closes. A few seconds later, the car in the garage bursts out, running over one of the thugs in the process. Then the car rams the kindnappers' car. The rest of the video shows the kidnappers in a panic as they try to flee.
39 bodies found in a truck in Essex, England, were identified Thursday as Chinese nationals. Police have not confirmed whether they were victims of a human trafficking or human smuggling operation, but charged the driver, a 25-year-old man from Northern Ireland, with murder.
Read the restThe truck was found on a street at the heart of the usually busy industrial area. Police -- who were called to the scene at around 1:40 a.m. on Wednesday -- said the victims were found dead on the scene.
Road haulage experts said the truck appeared to be refrigerated. That could mean freezing temperatures of anywhere between -5 to -10 degrees Fahrenheit (-20C to -23C), Richard Burnett, chief executive of trade body the Road Haulage Association, told PA news agency, making conditions "absolutely horrendous" for anyone stuck inside.
"I can't overstate how big a tragedy it is that 39 people felt like they had no better option than to get in the back of this truck and obviously it's ended in an absolute tragedy," Matthew Carter, an emergency communications delegate for the British Red Cross, told CNN at the scene on Wednesday.
Tan Youhui, a businessman in Guanxi, China, paid a hitman $282,000 to take out a competitor. But that hitman hired another hitman, offering $141,000 for the contract. That hitman hired another hitman. He subcontracted too. Then that hitman hired another hitman. And that hitman approached the target, a Mr. Wei, and proposed they fake his death, so everyone gets paid and no-one gets hurt. Unfortunately for Tan and all five hitmen, Wei went to the cops.
The BBC summarizes:
The saga of the subcontracted hitmen dates back to a professional dispute in 2013, when Mr Wei took legal action against Tan's firm, the Nanning Intermediate People's Court said on its website. Scared of losing money fighting a lengthy court case, Tan contacted hitman Xi Guangan and offered him ¥2m ($282,000) to kill Mr Wei. Xi accepted the job but shortly afterwards asked another hitman, Mo Tianxiang, to kill Mr Wei instead, offering him ¥1m. After Mo accepted, Xi renegotiated with Tan to be paid another ¥1m after the killing. ... [more hitmen] ... Instead of carrying out the murder, Ling met up with Mr Wei in a cafe, told him there was a hit on him and proposed a plan - that the two of them fake the murder. nMr Wei agreed to pose, gagged and bound, for a photo that Ling could take back to Yang Guangsheng - before later reporting the case to the police.
The best part: each bad guy in the chain got progressively more lenient sentences, with Tan off to jail for five years and the hit men receiving 42 months, 39 months, 39 months, 36 months and 31 months. Read the rest
In this recording, embedded below, Trump lawyer William Consovoy tells Judge Denny Chin that if President Donald Trump were to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, he could not be investigated for the murder while in office. The context is oral arguments in Trump v. Vance, one of the legal efforts to get Trump, a famously unscrupulous and bankruptcy-prone businessman, to publicly disclose his tax returns.
Here is Trump's lawyer, William Consovoy, telling Judge Denny Chin that if Trump were to shoot someone on fifth avenue, he could not be criminally investigated while in office.
Very normal argument. pic.twitter.com/xlDBwmCUnR
— Erick Fernandez (@ErickFernandez) October 23, 2019
To most Republicans, Trump is the country. The suggestion of him doing something "wrong" is already meaningless except as a threat to them. Working with him is possible, if you're not part of the in-group, but working with them is pointless. They're either in or they're out. Read the rest
Police in New York City are hunting a pumpkin smasher who seems bent on ruining halloween for locals.
Does anyone recognize this tough guy pumpkin smasher. This happened on 81st Street between 3rd and 4th Avenue #Brooklyn. If so please call 718-439-4220.
The hat alone calls for a custodial sentence.
