LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — A woman has been convicted of helping to kill her cousin’s ex-boyfriend whose body was found inside a burning home near Lawrence.

38-year-old Christina Towell, of Leavenworth, pleaded no contest Thursday to felony first-degree murder in the November 2017 death of 34-year-old Joel Wales. Other charges, including burglary and arson, were dropped as part of the plea. Her cousin, Tria Evans, was convicted earlier of murder and other charges.

Evans and Wales had a child together and a history of domestic disputes. Prosecutors say text messages show that Towell and Evans plotted the death for more than a month and that Towell drove Evans to the scene.

Douglas County District Attorney Charles Branson described the killing in a statement as “heinous and calculated.”

SEDGWICK COUNTY —Law enforcement authorities are investigating two armed robberies and have three suspects in custody.

Just after 8:30p.m. March 12, police responded to an armed robbery call at Dollar General, 1625 South Rock in Wichita, according to officer Charley Davidson. Two employees told police two unknown suspects entered the business. One suspect pulled out a handgun and both demanded money. They took an undisclosed amount of cash and fled the business in a gray Chrysler 300 driven by a third suspect.

On March 14, police responded just after 9p.m. to a robbery at the Dollar Tree, 4830 East Lincoln. Two suspects entered the business, used a handgun and escaped with money, according to a female employee. Investigators learned that a third suspect had posed as a customer during the robbery, according to Davidson.

After an investigation, police arrested 24-year-old Rayontae Evans on Wednesday. They arrested 52-year-old Earl Williams and 37-year-old Derrick Smith Thursday, according to Davidson.

All three are being held in the Sedgwick County Jail on requested charges of aggravated robbery, according to Davidson.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded his investigation into Russian election interference and possible coordination with associates of President Donald Trump.

The Justice Department says Mueller delivered his final report Friday to Attorney General William Barr, who is reviewing it.

Mueller’s report, still confidential, sets the stage for big public fights to come. The next steps are up to Trump’s attorney general, to Congress and, in all likelihood, federal courts.

It’s not clear how much of the report will become public or provided to Congress. Barr has said he will write his own report summarizing Mueller’s findings.

The nearly two-year probe has shadowed Trump’s presidency and resulted in felony charges against 34 people including six people who served on Trump’s campaign.

By BARBARA ORTUTAY and FRANK BAJAK
AP Technology Writers

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook left hundreds of millions of user passwords readable by its employees for years, the company acknowledged Thursday after a security researcher exposed the lapse.

By storing passwords in readable plain text, Facebook violated fundamental computer-security practices. Those call for organizations and websites to save passwords in a scrambled form that makes it almost impossible to recover the original text.

“There is no valid reason why anyone in an organization, especially the size of Facebook, needs to have access to users’ passwords in plain text,” said cybersecurity expert Andrei Barysevich of Recorded Future.

Facebook said there is no evidence its employees abused access to this data. But thousands of employees could have searched them. The company said the passwords were stored on internal company servers, where no outsiders could access them. Even so, some privacy experts suggested that users change their Facebook passwords.

The incident reveals yet another huge and basic oversight at a company that insists it is a responsible guardian for the personal data of its 2.3 billion users worldwide.

The security blog KrebsOnSecurity said Facebook may have left the passwords of some 600 million Facebook users vulnerable. In a blog post , Facebook said it will likely notify “hundreds of millions” of Facebook Lite users, millions of Facebook users and tens of thousands of Instagram users that their passwords were stored in plain text.

Facebook Lite is a version designed for people with older phones or low-speed internet connections. It is used primarily in developing countries.

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted a new “privacy-focused vision” for the social network that would emphasize private communication over public sharing. The company wants to encourage small groups of people to carry on encrypted conversations that neither Facebook nor any other outsider can read.

The fact that the company couldn’t manage to do something as simple as encrypting passwords, however, raises questions about its ability to manage more complex encryption issues — such in messaging — flawlessly.

Facebook said it discovered the problem in January. But security researcher Brian Krebs wrote that in some cases the passwords had been stored in plain text since 2012. Facebook Lite launched in 2015 and Facebook bought Instagram in 2012.

The problem, according to Facebook, wasn’t due to a single bug. During a routine review in January, it say, it found that the plain text passwords were unintentionally captured and stored in its internal storage systems. This happened in a variety of circumstances — for example, when an app crashed and the resulting crash log included a captured password.

But Alex Holden, the founder of Hold Security, said Facebook’s explanation is not an excuse for sloppy security practices that allowed so many passwords to be exposed internally.

Recorded Future’s Barysevich said he could not recall any major company caught leaving so many passwords exposed. He said he’s seen a number of instances where much smaller organizations made such information readily available — not just to programmers but also to customer support teams.

Security analyst Troy Hunt, who runs the “haveibeenpwned.com” data breach website, said the situation may be embarrassing for Facebook but not dangerous unless an adversary gained access to the passwords. Facebook has had major breaches, most recently in September when attackers accessed some 29 million accounts.

Jake Williams, president of Rendition Infosec, said storing passwords in plain text is “unfortunately more common than most of the industry talks about” and tends to happen when developers are trying to rid a system of bugs.

He said the Facebook blog post suggests storing passwords in plain text may have been “a sanctioned practice,” although he said it’s also possible a “rogue development team” was to blame.

Hunt and Krebs both likened Facebook’s failure to similar stumbles last year on a far smaller scale at Twitter and GitHub; the latter is a site where developers store code and track projects. In those cases, software bugs were blamed for accidentally storing plaintext passwords in internal logs.

Facebook’s normal procedure for passwords is to store them encoded, the company noted Thursday in its blog post.

That’s good to know, although Facebook engineers apparently added code that defeated the safeguard, said security researcher Rob Graham. “They have all the proper locks on the doors, but somebody left the window open,” he said.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A gas stop in Missouri paid off handsomely for a Shawnee, Kansas, man, to the tune of $50 million.

The Missouri Lottery said Thursday that Hira Singh claimed a $50 million Mega Millions jackpot at the agency’s office in Jefferson City.

Singh stopped at a Kansas City, Missouri, QuikTrip store for gas earlier this month. While there, he bought a Mega Millions ticket for the March 12 drawing.

Good choice. It matched all of the numbers: 10, 12, 16, 49 and 57, with a Mega Ball of 18.

Singh didn’t initially realize he won. He found out while using a Check-A-Ticket machine. Just to be sure, he checked three times.