Reader’s Links on February 5, 2018

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In order to preserve the flow of conversation about various posted items, and also in order to make it easier for visitors to find the list of related links being shared by other readers, regulars and interested parties in one place, each day a post is automatically created at a minute past midnight ET.

This way, under the various posts of the day, conversation can take place without as much ‘noise’ on the various links and articles and ideas in the main posts and all the news links being submitted can be seen under these auto-posts by clicking on the comments-link right below these ones.

Thank you all for those that take the effort to assist this site in keeping the public informed. Below, typically people can find the latest enemy propaganda, news items of related materials from multiple countries and languages, op-eds from many excellent sites who write on our topics, geopolitics and immigration issues and so on.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

147 Replies to “Reader’s Links on February 5, 2018”

  1. The US branch of Macy’s is about to get more Muslim-friendly.

    Shoppers in the States, rejoice—you’re about to have more hijab-friendly finds at your fingertips.

    Macy’s has announced a new collaboration with a modestwear brand to stock Islam-friendly fashion for both Muslim and non-Muslim women.

    The department store giant, which has a branch right here in Dubai, is teaming up with Verona Collection to welcome its first modest line, which will hit the US e-commerce website on February 15.

    (Incidentally, the site does offer shipping to the UAE, so we can also shop the collection from afar).

    The curated ready-to-wear range will include dresses, tops, cardigans, pants and hijabs in a variety of colours, Macy’s revealed in a press release, with prices ranging from US$13 to US$85.

    more :
    http://emirateswoman.com/this-department-store-giant-will-launch-its-first-modest-collection/

  2. Hateful Leftist Blames President Trump for her Rage Addiction
    February 5, 2018

    This sad piece of clickbait is making its shameful rounds. It’s supposed to be a new call for unity, but it reads like a confession from a drug addict.

    I went to the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., and I arrived home feeling heartbroken. It was the last way I expected to feel…

    I wanted to be with people who shared my anger. Because I have been so angry about Donald Trump this past year. I have been angry at my country for electing this man, angry at my neighbors who support him, angry at the wealthy who sacrificed our country and its goodness for tax breaks, angry at the coal miners who believed his promises.

    My fury has been bottomless. I drink my morning coffee from a cup that says, “I hate to wake up when Donald Trump is President.” The constancy of my outrage has been exhausting, yet I have not yet found a way to quell it — nearly each day has brought a new reason to stoke the fire. But a day with my daughter, communing with the angry and the aggrieved, seemed a good way to try.

    It’s called rage addiction. It’s not uncommon.

    https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/269221/hateful-leftist-blames-president-trump-her-rage

    • “Like most lefties, she wants to see herself as a good person while hating everyone outside her political circle. The encounter interfered with this egotistical attitude. It made her feel like she might be the bad person for being angry and hateful.

      So her response is to try to stop hating random people she suspects might be Trump voters. That’s progress, but it’s not an answer. The answer is to examine the real causes of her anger and address them.

      Because it isn’t about Trump. It’s about her.”

  3. The Netherlands withdraw ambassador to Turkey as ties sour

    The Netherlands announced Monday it was withdrawing its ambassador from Turkey, and will refuse a new envoy from Ankara as diplomatic ties plunged to new lows.

    Relations have deteriorated in recent months after Dutch officials barred two Turkish ministers from attending a rally in Rotterdam on the eve of March general elections here.

    Despite recent high-level talks between the two countries, “we have not been able to agree on the way normalisation should take place,” Foreign Minister Halbe Zijlstra said in a statement.

    The Dutch government has therefore “decided to officially withdraw the Netherlands’ ambassador in Ankara, who has not had access to Turkey since March 2017,” the foreign ministry added.

    “As long as the Netherlands has no ambassador to Turkey, the Netherlands will also not issue permission for a new Turkish ambassador to take up duties in the Netherlands.”

    Ankara, however, insisted that “relations between Turkey and the Netherlands have not been broken off.”

    […]Relations between the two NATO allies have unravelled since the Netherlands expelled Turkey’s Family Minister Fatma Betul Sayan Kayar in March.

    The country had also barred another minister’s plane from landing as both Turkish politicians sought to attend a Rotterdam rally of Dutch-Turkish citizens in favour of last April’s Turkish referendum.

    But Betul Sayan Kayar defied the Dutch government ban, arriving by car from Germany to press for the powers of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to be extended in the referendum.

    Protests erupted in the port city as Dutch police stopped her addressing the rally, and gave her a motorcade escort out of the country.

    Riot police had to move in to break up an angry demonstration using dogs, horses and water cannon, which added to political tensions just days before the Dutch general elections.

    Furious Turkish officials in vain demanded an apology for the minister’s treatment from Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

    And the Dutch ambassador, who had been abroad at the time, was blocked from returning to Turkey.

    Erdogan even accused the Dutch of behaving like “fascists” in their treatment of the Turkish ministers — comments which triggered anger in the Netherlands, occupied by Nazi Germany in World War II.

    The Netherlands is home to some 400,000 people of Turkish origin, and the two countries have had diplomatic relations for some four centuries.

    The Dutch NOS public broadcaster reported Monday that the recent talks had sought to find a “magic formula” to restore ties, under which neither side would have to apologise.

    “This formula has clearly not been found, and the deterioration between the two countries has clearly gone further than we thought,” NOS added.

    http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/8/289431/World/Region/The-Netherlands-withdraw-ambassador-to-Turkey-as-t.aspx

  4. McCain Bill Offers Mass Illegal Amnesty for “Study”
    February 5, 2018
    Daniel Greenfield

    Senator McCain seems determined to make the end of his Senate career into an ongoing demonstration of why Trump won. This isn’t even the fig leaf that Ryan and Rubio might have offered. It’s a joke.

    Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Christopher Coons (D-Del.) will introduce immigration legislation on Monday in an effort to reach a budget deal

    The bipartisan piece of legislation provides recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, commonly known as “Dreamers,” an opportunity for citizenship while ordering a study to figure out what border security measures are needed, according to the Journal.

    It’s a study.

    https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/269228/mccain-bill-offers-mass-illegal-amnesty-study-daniel-greenfield

  5. Pologne – Forty years ago, Poland lit the spark that would put an end to Communist totalitarianism in Central and Eastern Europe. Today, the European Commission has launched the first phase of Article 7 of the Lisbon Treaty against Poland. The country is accused of not respecting European fundamental values. Is it true that so soon after its return to the “free world”, Poland is on the verge of becoming a dictatorship again?

    To better understand the origin of the tensions between Poland and the European Commission, it is necessary to return to the conflict around the Constitutional Court which animates the Polish political scene for several years now. Through Frans Timmermans, its responsible for upholding the rule of law in the EU and in charge of the “Polish dossier”, the European Commission criticizes the Polish government for failing to respect the principle of separation of powers by appointing “its” judges to the Constitutional Court. The latter represents the highest degree of jurisdiction of the Polish state. It is composed of fifteen judges, including a president.

    https://visegradpost.com/en/2018/02/05/triggering-article-7-against-poland-nuclear-bomb-or-wet-firecracker/

  6. The Cost of Illegal Immigration

    by Ruthie Blum
    February 5, 2018 at 5:30 am

    https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11829/illegal-immigration-cost

    In his State of the Union address on January 30, US President Donald J. Trump referred to the brutal murder of two 16-year-old girls from Long Island in December 2016 by members of the “savage MS-13 gang,” responsible for a spate of other gruesome killings in the area, as well.

    Many of these gang members, he explained, had entered the United States illegally. “For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities,” he said.

    Calling on Congress “to finally close the deadly loopholes that have allowed… criminal gangs to break into our country,” he listed the four pillars of his immigration-reform proposal:

  7. And now for something completely different…

    Note: This modified approach to manufacturing integrated circuits (ICs) could be a profound game-changer in countless ways. Monocrystalline (i.e., single-crystal) substrates—more commonly known as “wafers”—which possess atomically flat surfaces are unbelievably expensive. After crystal-pulling and float zone refinement, the silicon ingot can approach a staggering 99.9999999% (“seven nines”) purity level—with attendant costs attached.

    Current device fabrication employs 12″ (400 mm) diameter wafers and the industry is engaged in migration over to 18″ (450 mm) substrates. Although prices can fluctuate, a 12″ wafer easily runs $200 dollars (or more). The previous transition from 200 mm to 300 mm wafer diameters represented a 5X cost-per-wafer increase to obtain slightly more than double the surface area (i.e., “real estate”).

    This latest transition from 300 mm to 400 mm substrate diameters equates to a shift of about 80¢ per square inch over to $1.77. While doubling in price (per wafer), obtaining twice the “acreage” represents a significant gain, especially when individual CPU devices can sell for hundreds of dollars each.

    At the risk of becoming overly technical [bwahahahaha!!!], these gigantic silicon wafers—think; the diameter of a personal or family-sized pizza—represent a dual-edged prospect (as all technology does). On the negative side, there are only around a dozen companies in the entire world that can reside at the sharply-pointed tip of this industrial pyramid (e.g., IBM, Intel, AMD, Samsung, Hitachi, Hundai, TSMC, Philips inter alia). This rarefied atmosphere viciously inhibits beneficial competition and creates (for newcomers) a prohibitive “cost-of-entry” into the arena that few venture capital investors are even remotely willing to fund.

    More obscurely, but on the positive side, device rejection rates (i.e., for non-performing ICs) drop meaningfully when the several hundred processing steps (like layer deposition, photo-patterning, developing, bake-out, etch, electrical testing, etc.) are cut in half by using larger wafers which mean that any process errors are confined to a single substrate instead of two (or more), to fabricate the same number of devices.

    As it is, just building a 400 mm-wafer device fabrication facility requires a billion-plus dollar investment. And that’s before the first “wafer start” (i.e., initiation of a fabrication run) has taken place.

    Only the photolithography masking plates are more expensive (but have a lifetime of patterning about 500 wafers before non-repairable damage-related defects begin to harm working device yields). As an example, the set of photomasks for an Intel Pentium microprocessor (CPU or Central Processing Unit) costs around one million dollars. This means that there is a $2K built-in cost per finished wafer just for that tooling alone.

    For a useful (and brief) overview of IC fabrication, please see: From sand to hand: How a CPU is made

    TLDR?

    Imagine if—after all of those hundreds of astronomically expensive fabrication process steps on that ridiculously cost-intensive monocrystalline silicon wafer (or other even more insanely expensive exotic-material substrates like: gallium arsenide, silicon carbide, germanium, silicon-on-insulator, etc.)—one could merely (like the decalcomania for model airplanes) slide off the entire, working, multi-layer aggregate of IC (i.e., Integrated Circuit) devices like fried eggs out of an unbuttered, non-stick cooking skillet. Leaving behind a ready-to-use, supremely cost-intensive wafer that merely required a cheap round of surface cleaning before being used to make more of those several-hundred-of-dollars-per-chip solid state devices. Please consider how that might drop the cost of your personal computer’s memory and CPU performance costs like an anvil heaved off of a skyscraper.

    MIT’s investigation of depositing a single-atom thickness of (absurdly inexpensive, carbon-based) graphene on bare silicon wafers before initiating multi-layer fabrication opens the door for this very attractive reuse and re-purposing of substrates.

    Put another way, the energy required to manufacture monocrystalline silicon wafers is like running your own little volcano. As in, melting rock; which is right up there with the expense of refining iron ore into steel. These two processes rank (along with making concrete) very near the top of energy-consuming industrial processes.

    On with the show!

    New Technique Vastly Reduces Cost of Wafer Technology

    In 2016, annual global semiconductor sales reached $339 billion worldwide. In that same year, the semiconductor industry spent about $7.2 billion worldwide on wafers that serve as the substrates for microelectronics components. These ultimately turned into quintillions of transistors, light-emitting diodes, and other electronic and photonic devices.

    Going forward, a new technique developed by MIT engineers may vastly reduce the overall cost of wafer technology and enable devices made from more exotic, higher-performing semiconductor materials than conventional silicon.

    The new method, reported recently in Nature, uses graphene as a sort of “copy machine” to transfer intricate crystalline patterns from an underlying semiconductor wafer to a top layer of identical material. Graphene is a single-atom-thick sheet of graphite, with miraculous properties, which looks like chicken-wire at the nano-scale.

    Since graphene’s discovery in 2004, researchers have been investigating its exceptional electrical properties in hopes of improving the performance and cost of electronic devices. The MIT group took an entirely new approach to using graphene in semiconductors. Instead of focusing on graphene’s electrical properties, the researchers looked at the material’s mechanical features.

    Graphene, with its ultrathin, Teflon-like properties, can be sandwiched between a wafer and its semiconducting layer, providing a barely perceptible, nonstick surface through which the semiconducting material’s atoms can still rearrange in the pattern of the wafer’s crystals. The material, once imprinted, can simply be peeled off from the graphene surface, allowing manufacturers to reuse the original wafer.

    The team found that its technique, which they term “remote epitaxy,” was successful in copying and peeling off layers of semiconductors from the same semiconductor wafers. The researchers had success in applying their technique to exotic wafer and semiconducting materials, including indium phosphide, gallium arsenenide, and gallium phosphide – materials that are 50 to 100 times more expensive than silicon.

    They are also investigating mixing and matching various semiconductors and stacking them up as a multimaterial structure. Exotic materials should become more practical to use, because you don’t have to worry about the cost of the wafer. With this graphene copy machine, engineers can grow a semiconductor device, peel it off, and reuse the wafer.

    The MIT engineers worked out carefully controlled procedures to place single sheets of graphene onto an expensive wafer. They then grew semiconducting material over the graphene layer. They found that graphene is thin enough to appear electrically invisible, allowing the top layer to see through the graphene to the underlying crystalline wafer, imprinting its patterns without being influenced by the graphene.

    Graphene is also rather “slippery” and does not tend to stick to other materials easily, enabling the engineers to simply peel the top semiconducting layer from the wafer after its structures have been imprinted.

    In conventional semiconductor manufacturing, the wafer, once its crystalline pattern is transferred, is so strongly bonded to the semiconductor that it is almost impossible to separate without damaging both layers. So, you end up having to sacrifice the wafer – it becomes part of the device.

    But with the group’s new technique, manufacturers can now use graphene as an intermediate layer, allowing them to copy and paste the wafer, separate a copied film from the wafer, and reuse the wafer many times over. In addition to saving on the cost of wafers, this opens opportunities for exploring more exotic semiconductor materials.

    The industry has been stuck on silicon, and even though we’ve known about better performing semiconductors, we haven’t been able to use them, because of their cost. This gives the industry freedom in choosing semiconductor materials by performance and not cost.

  8. THE ONLY SURVIVING suspect in the 2015 Paris attacks has accused a Belgian court of bias against Muslims, saying he put his “trust in Allah” as he went on trial for a deadly shootout with police.

    Salah Abdeslam, 28, cut a defiant figure at the court while refusing to stand for the judge or to answer questions about the bloody gun battle in Brussels that led to his capture in 2016.

    The Belgian-born French national of Moroccan descent was transferred to Brussels under police escort from a jail near Paris to answer charges of attempted terrorist murder of police officers.

    “My silence does not make me a criminal, it’s my defence,” Abdeslam told judges at the Palais de Justice in the Belgian capital.

    http://www.thejournal.ie/paris-attacks-trial-brussels-3834264-Feb2018/

    • If he shuts up … SHUT HIM UP.

      Prolong his confinement indefinitely until this turd finally behaves himself.

      Full stop.

    • There’s No Way Out—China Cracks Down on VPNs

      This is a superb example of why totalitarian régimes like Communist China are so (utterly, deservingly) screwed, blued, and tattooed.

      In this “Information Age”, attempting to regulate, control, or merely even hope to monitor the petabytes of digital content that is exchanged every few microseconds, represents a Herculean task oppressive evil that not even Nazi Germany could have dreamed of.

      That Red China continues to delude itself about adequately controlling this modern spate of knowledge-based data is a pluperfect example of why the world’s so-called “second largest economy” is, instead, headed straight for the sh!t-hole toilet.

      Seeking to meticulously regulate all free exchange of crucial online (educational, commercial, transactional, interpersonal, or simply casual) information represents a task better suited to demented, OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) lunatics than people with an IQ even slightly above room temperature (and we’re talking CENTIGRADE!!!)

      In a manner that is so desperately beyond the restrictive limits of ordinary self-insertion, Communist China dearly needs to go fü¢k itself with the sort of imaginative and limitless abandon that only manages to get demonstrated at San Francisco’s annual Gay Pride Parade.

      Were the international community truly concerned about this hideous and perpetually ongoing abuse of human rights crime against humanity, it would screen and recruit the necessary platoon of blinded, must-enraged elephants which would ensure that Beijing’s Mandarins all received their fair share well-deserved maximal, orificial dilation.

      • We know China is going down, the question is who else (besides North Korea) will they take down with them?

        Next Question who will pay to clean up the environmental mess they will leave behind? If they aren’t hurt too badly in the crash Hong Kong will clean up the areas near them so they can grow food and get potable water. Taiwan will clean up as much land near them as they can afford but who will clean up the rest?

        Will the Chinese sell monopoly rights to nations or multinationals for certain regions with part of the price being cleaning up the land?

      • Lots of nations trade BIGLY with China. Check out how many countries list China as #1 or #2 trading partner. The ripple-effect of her crash will be devastating for countries that don’t “deserve” it.

        We won’t be able to ameliorate the massive suffering that will ensue. That’s why I’m not jumping up and down thrilled at every milestone on the way down.

        NOT that I’m not rooting for China. _At all._
        ‘Red’ or ‘Green’, it’s all black-&-blue. Vicious oppression is what it is. You want to survive, THEN to have agency as a human being.

        Most slaves don’t have any understanding of the word “communism”. As bad as it was in the Soviet Union, it was worlds better than China. There was at least a memory of the Judeo-Christian, European soul.

        “Hijab for a Day” looks like Acid-Face of Afghanistan or Pakistan. Soft Stalin, Hard Mao?

        Dehumanizing totalitarians, Red-Green turns Black for death.

        • “The ripple-effect of her crash will be devastating for countries that don’t “deserve” it.”

          Those countries that propped up the Communist regime?

        • I am not celebrating the steps to their destruction just marking them down. Yes there will be a massive ripple effect and as I pointed out the amount of damage to the various nations will depend on how much trade they do with China and how weak their economy is. We can take it as a given that Greece will collapse but I don’t know about the rest of the European nations. Of course it could be a collapse in trade from Europe caused by civil wars that causes China to collapse.

          Or the Dems could succeed in causing the US economy to crash bringing everyone else in the world down.

        • Check out how many countries list China as #1 or #2 trading partner. The ripple-effect of her crash will be devastating for countries that don’t “deserve” it.

          All countries stupid enough to rely upon Communist China (and that includes America) will “deserve” the fallout.

          Better that it happens sooner than later, when there is even more incentive (and potentially less reluctance) to make war.

          There is so much in the way of economic, genetic, and environmental healing that needs to be accomplished that any prolonged delay will cause even greater havoc on The Mainland.

          If ever there was a “pay me now, or pay me later” situation, it is the one confronting Red China.

          • For countries in East and Southeast Asia, the “Red” or “communist” factor weighs less than their need to feed their own people.

            Does that make them complicit? That’s a judgement call all too easy for Westerners who live under the American security umbrella.

  9. In March 2016 Carter Page Was an FBI Employee – In October 2016 FBI Told FISA Court He’s a Spy…
    Posted on February 5, 2018 by sundance
    In 2013 Carter Page was working as an under-cover employee (UCE) of the FBI, helping them to build a case against “Evgeny Buryakov”. In March 2016 Carter Page remained their informant pre-trial. [Note – Pay attention to the names in the following citations]

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/02/05/in-march-2016-carter-page-was-an-fbi-employee-in-october-2016-fbi-told-fisa-court-hes-a-spy/#more-145498

    • Xanthippa Mr Page working with FBI doesn’t make any sense.
      In December 2016 he was going public that his computer was hacked.
      The FBI said, “no.” that he wasn’t hacked they renewed his FISA I warrant shortly after.

      FISA I warrant means he is a HOSTILE foreign agent which means anyone he comes into contact with can be monitored.
      Yet, they didn’t tell Trump he had a hostile foreign agent on his staff.

      Next Memo coming out should be how the FBI information was passed to the Clinton campaign.

      • Given what has come out he wasn’t a hostile foreign actor he was a semi competent hanger on who was rejected by the Trump Campaign, The Russians and only found work when the FBI wanted to use him as an excuse to spy on Trump.

    • A Life of Fear

      First and foremost, thank you, Richard.

      Much like this ongoing Christian genocide that is happening throughout the MME (Muslim Middle East) and so many other global precincts, the South African slaughter of Whites in sub-Saharan Africa is both under-reported and intentionally disregarded by the vast majority of this planet’s channels of global (propaganda) media.

      Far too few netizens understand how (in its time) Rhodesia once was “Africa’s bread basket” (i.e., primary supplier of wheat). Enter scumbag extraordinaire Robert Mugabe and “Zimbabwe” suddenly became home to the first nation that ever printed a HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLAR bank note. To the point where European nations routinely posted signs that prohibited the use of this same printed currency as TOILET PAPER!

      Not many people on earth and, far too few readers here at Vlad Tepes Blog, even have the slightest understanding that ONE Zimbabwe dollar used to buy a brick that, by current standards, would (now) not even purchase a shred of re-bar or cinder-block to build even the most rudimentary sort of hovel in Zimbabwe.

      Say, “Thank you, Robert Mugabe” for ensuring that Zimbabwe (Africa’s one-time “bread basket”), now relies upon massive foreign aid to survive constant famine.

      Something that the ANC (African National Congress) adamantly refuses to condemn (when it comes to) this ridiculously-bemedaled “leader”, even as he has guaranteed that his nation irreversibly spiraled into abject poverty.

      I will close with a single question: “Why is this oxygen thief still respiring?”

      If ever there was a mission for America’s troops to fulfill, it is ensuring that Robert Mugabe’s ability to inhale another molecule of fresh air became overwhelmingly difficult.

      Preventing the killing of White farmers in Zimbabwe (or South Africa) is another one of those absurd tasks which I have this nasty habit of suggesting.

      Go figure…

  10. A California political science professor reportedly called President Trump a “white supremacist” and an “orange reality star” in a syllabus for her class, and at one point asked how students “will explain” the current political era.
    Dr. Brooke Mascagni, who teaches “American Political Institutions” at California State University-Dominguez Hills, rails against Trump in the “shortened version” syllabus, according to Campus Reform.

    http://archive.is/PZAU5#selection-1339.0-1359.1

  11. Officers armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 machine guns have been stationed outside two police stations in Malmö in a move intended to ward off “vengeance attacks” from criminals.
    The protective measure was put in place on Saturday night outside police stations in the troubled district of Rosengård, where an explosive device was detonated last night, and in Sällerupsvägen, where a police car was blown up in December.

    https://www.thelocal.se/20180204/officers-with-machine-guns-posted-at-malm-police-stations

    • Officers armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 machine guns have been stationed outside two police stations in Malmö in a move intended to ward off “vengeance attacks” from criminals.

      How about just tracking down these “criminals” and offing arresting them, instead of all this prinking about with MP5s?

      • The Swedish government has lost control of the country and are afraid to go after the criminals the way we all know should be done. This has become a war and one that the Swedish Government doesn’t have a clue on how to win.

  12. Syria: Turkish military convoy approaches southern Aleppo

    A convoy of 50 Turkish military vehicles reportedly arrived at a strategic Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) stronghold near the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) lines, in the south of Aleppo Province, Monday.

  13. COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV) – 6:27 p.m.: In a short news conference Monday evening, Sheriff Bill Elder identified the slain deputy as 34-year-old Deputy MicahFlick.

    Elder spoke of his “profound sadness” at losing the young deputy, who leaves behind a wife and 7-year-old twins.

    Monday was Flick’s 11-year anniversary with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.

    http://www.kktv.com/content/news/BREAKING–472820573.html

  14. 9/11 conspirator held at Colorado Supermax sues Trump, claims ‘psychological torture’

    The only person convicted in the United States in connection with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is suing President Donald Trump over conditions at a federal prison, where he alleges he experiences “psychological torture” while kept in total isolation.

    Zacarias Moussaoui, 49, has filed handwritten petitions in federal courts in Oklahoma and Colorado in which he accuses federal authorities of attempting to cover up the “true” Sept. 11 conspirators. Courts have dismissed other federal lawsuits Moussaoui filed over the years in various states, including a 2014 lawsuit in which he claimed he could offer inside information about the inner workings of al-Qaida.

    Among other things, Moussaoui’s petitions seek an end to prison guidelines that he says “keep me in total isolation without access to a lawyer to break me psychologically…” Moussaoui, who describes himself as a “slave of Allah” and the “so call 20th hijacker” in the petitions, also seeks the assistance of various civilian and military judicial officials and claims that he has been assaulted while in federal custody.

    A French citizen of Moroccan descent, Moussaoui lived and attended flight school in Norman, Oklahoma, prior to the terrorist attacks. He left Oklahoma for Minnesota and was arrested on immigration charges in August 2001 after employees of a Minnesota flight school became alarmed that he wanted to learn to fly a Boeing 747 even though he had no pilot’s license.

    Moussaoui was in custody on Sept. 11 and pleaded guilty in April 2005 to conspiring with the 19 hijackers to kill Americans. A federal appeals court upheld Moussaoui’s conviction in 2010 and he is serving a life prison sentence at the Supermax federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

    Moussaoui has given multiple accounts of his connection to the attacks, and since his sentencing has said he lied when testifying that he plotted to hijack a fifth jetliner on Sept. 11.

    His court-appointed defense team — with whom Moussaoui did not cooperate — portrayed him during his trial as a delusional schizophrenic who lied to either achieve martyrdom through his execution or to enhance his role in history. Prosecutors said he had only a personality disorder.

    http://kdvr.com/2018/02/05/9-11-conspirator-held-at-colorado-supermax-sues-trump-claims-psychological-torture/

  15. ‘We are victims of our own tolerance in Europe’: German court bans mosque’s call to prayer

    A court in a small German town has banned the Muslim call to prayer from its local mosque. That’s after an elderly couple complained – but not just about the noise.