State prosecution in firebombing attack on demonstration for Israeli hostages moves ahead
State prosecution in firebombing attack on demonstration for Israeli hostages moves ahead/node/2608227/world
State prosecution in firebombing attack on demonstration for Israeli hostages moves ahead
In this booking photo released on June 2, 2025, by the Boulder Police Department, Mohamed Sabry Soliman is seen at the Boulder County Jail on June 1, 2025, in Boulder, Colorado. (AFP)
State prosecution in firebombing attack on demonstration for Israeli hostages moves ahead
Federal authorities say Soliman, an Egyptian national, had been living in the US illegally with his family at the time
Updated 16 July 2025
AP
DENVER: A judge ruled Tuesday that Colorado prosecutors can move ahead with their case against a man accused of killing one person and injuring a dozen more in a firebomb attack on demonstrators showing support for Israeli hostages in Gaza.
A police detective had been set to testify at a hearing explaining the evidence gathered against Mohamed Sabry Soliman in the June 1 attack on the weekly event in Boulder. But Soliman’s lawyer, Kathryn Herold, told Judge Nancy W. Salomone that he gave up his right to hear the evidence.
Soliman, wearing an orange and white striped jail uniform, told Salomone that he understood he was waiving his right to a hearing following a discussion with his lawyers Monday.
Despite that, prosecutors and victims who sat across the courtroom from Soliman or watched the hearing online were caught off guard by the decision.
Salomone said the case would now move ahead to an arraignment and scheduled a Sept. 9 hearing for Soliman to enter a plea to murder, attempted murder and other charges over the defense’s objection.
Herold said Soliman would not be ready to enter a plea then because of the large amount of evidence in the case and the murder charges recently added against him following the death of Karen Diamond, an 82-year-old woman injured in the attack. Herold said she expected to ask for the arraignment hearing to be delayed and suggested that a plea deal was possible.
20th Judicial District Attorney Michael Dougherty objected to a delay, saying any discussions could happen before and after an arraignment. He declined to comment on the possibility of a deal after the hearing.
Investigators say Soliman told them he intended to kill the roughly 20 participants at the weekly event on Boulder’s Pearl Street pedestrian mall. But he threw just two of more than two dozen Molotov cocktails he had with him while yelling, “Free Palestine!” Police said he told them he got scared because he had never hurt anyone before.
Federal authorities say Soliman, an Egyptian national, had been living in the US illegally with his family at the time.
Soliman has pleaded not guilty to federal hate crime charges and is scheduled to go on trial in federal court in Denver in September. However, his lawyers told US District Judge John L. Kane last week that they expect to ask for a delay.
Additional charges related to Diamond’s death could also slow down the federal proceedings. Assistant US Attorney Laura Cramer-Babycz told Kane that prosecutors have not decided yet whether to file additional charges against Soliman.
Federal prosecutors allege the victims were targeted because of their perceived or actual connection to Israel. But Soliman’s federal defense lawyers say he should not have been charged with hate crimes because the evidence shows he was motivated by opposition to Zionism, the political movement to establish and sustain a Jewish state in Israel.
An attack motivated by someone’s political views is not considered a hate crime under federal law.
State prosecutors have identified 29 victims in the attack. Thirteen of them were physically injured, and the others were nearby and are considered victims because they could have been hurt. A dog was also injured in the attack, so Soliman has also been charged with animal cruelty.
Gambian man sentenced to more than 67 years after US conviction for torture
Michael Sang Correa, a member of former Gambian dictator Jammeh’s death squad, was convicted by US jury in April
Rights groups say former Jammeh carried out brutalities through armed unit
Updated 5 sec ago
Reuters
A Gambian man who was part of an armed unit run by former dictator Yahya Jammeh and was convicted of torture by a US jury in April has been sentenced to more than 67 years in prison, the US Justice Department said on Friday.
A Colorado jury convicted the Gambian national, Michael Sang Correa, for his participation in the torture of numerous victims in Gambia in 2006, including beating and flesh burning, because of the victims’ purported involvement in a coup plot against the then-president, the Justice Department said.
Correa, 46, was sentenced to 810 months in prison by Senior Judge Christine Arguello for the District of Colorado after conviction on one count of conspiracy to commit torture and five counts of torture, the department said in a statement.
The case marked the first criminal prosecution over involvement in the feared armed group known as “the Junglers,” which operated in Gambia’s police state during Jammeh’s rule. The former president seized power in 1994 and foiled several attempts to overthrow him before he lost a 2016 election.
Correa was arrested in 2020 under a law which makes it a crime for anyone in the US to commit torture abroad.
Jammeh denied torture during his rule.
The Junglers were a secretive offshoot of the Gambian army that took orders from Jammeh. Rights groups and former victims say they carried out brutalities that worsened after a failed coup in 2006.
Suspected coup plotters and other outspoken opponents of Jammeh were taken to the National Intelligence Agency near one of the capital Banjul’s white sand beaches, according to victims.
Some found themselves in a torture chamber where they were subjected to electric shocks, beatings and burning with acid, they said. (Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Edmund Klamann)
Being Muslim and American in the nation’s heartland
The Muslim presence across the Midwest grew exponentially after a 1965 immigration law eliminated the quotas that had blocked arrivals from many parts of the world since the mid-1920s, Curtis said
Faroz Waziri jokes that he and his wife Mena might have been the first Afghans in town when they came in the mid-2010s on a special visa for those who had worked for the US armed forces overseas
“You can be a Muslim that’s practicing your religion and still coexist with everybody else around you,” said Hassan Igram, who chairs the center’s board of trustees
Updated 18 sec ago
AP
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa: The oldest surviving place of worship for Muslims in the United States is a white clapboard building on a grassy corner plot, as unassumingly Midwestern as its neighboring houses in Cedar Rapids – except for a dome.
The descendants of the Lebanese immigrants who constructed “the Mother Mosque” almost a century ago — along with newcomers from Afghanistan, East Africa and beyond — are defining what it can mean to be both Muslim and American in the nation’s heartland just as heightened conflicts in the Middle East fuel tensions over immigration and Islam in the United States.
Imam Taha Tawil of "The Mother Mosque of America" discusses the building's long history in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Friday, Aug. 8, 2025. (AP)
Standing by the door in a gold-embroidered black robe, Fatima Igram Smejkal greeted the faithful with a cheerful “salaam” as they hurried into the Islamic Center of Cedar Rapids for Friday prayers. In 1934, her family helped open what the National Register of Historic Places calls “the first building designed and constructed specifically as a house of worship for Muslims in the United States.”
“They all came from nothing … so they wanted to give back,” Smejkal said of families like hers, who arrived at the turn of the 20th century. “That’s why I’m so kind to the ones that come in from Somalia and the Congo and Sudan and Afghanistan. I have no idea what they left, what they’re thinking when they walk in that mosque.”
Muslims attend Friday prayer at the Islamic Center of Cedar Rapids on Friday, Aug. 8, 2025, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (AP)
The community now gathers in the Islamic Center. It was built in the 1970s when they became too many for the Mother Mosque’s living-room-sized prayer hall, and now they’re have outgrown its prayer hall, as well. Hundreds of fifth-generation Muslim Iowans, recent refugees and migrants pray on industrial carpets rolled onto the gym’s basketball court — the elderly on walkers, babies in car seats, women in headscarves and men sporting headgear from African kufi and Afghan pakol caps to baseball hats.
This physical space where diverse groups gather helps sustain community as immigrants try to preserve their heritage while assimilating into US culture and society.
Community members talk after Friday prayer at the Islamic Center of Cedar Rapids on Friday, Aug. 8, 2025, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (AP)
“You can be a Muslim that’s practicing your religion and still coexist with everybody else around you,” said Hassan Igram, who chairs the center’s board of trustees. He shares the same first and last names as his grandfather and Smejkal’s grandfather – two cousins who came to Iowa as boys in the 1910s.
Lebanese migrants ‘Mother Mosque’
Tens of thousands of young men, both Christians and Muslims, settled in booming Midwestern towns after fleeing the Ottoman Empire, many with little more than a Bible or a Qur’an in their bags. They often worked selling housewares off their backs to widely scattered farms, earning enough to buy horses and buggies, and then opened grocery stores.
Two young girls stand together outside of the Islamic Center of Cedar Rapids after Friday prayer on Aug. 8, 2025, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (AP)
Through bake sales and community dinners, a group of Muslim women raised money in the 1920s to build what was called the “Muslim Temple.” Like the Igrams, Anace Aossey remembers attending prayer there with his parents – though as children they were more focused on the Dixie Cream donuts that would follow.
“We weren’t raised real strict religiously,” said Aossey, whose father sold goods along the tracks from a 175-pound sack. “They were here to integrate themselves into the American society.”
Growing up Muslim in America
Muslims sometimes faced institutional discrimination. After serving in World War II, Smejkal’s father, Abdallah Igram, successfully campaigned for soldiers’ dog tags to include Muslim as an option, along with Catholic, Protestant and Jewish.
Mohamed Mahmoud, right, helps Afghan refugee Faroz Waziri, left, and his son select deserts at the halal grocery store he opened in 2022 after immigrating from Sudan on Friday, Aug. 8, 2025, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (AP)
But in Cedar Rapids, immigrants found mutual acceptance, fostered through houses of worship and friendships between US-born children and their non-Muslim neighbors. Smejkal’s best friend was Catholic, and her father kept beef hot dogs in the kitchen to respect the Muslim prohibition against pork. Smejkal’s father, in turn, made sure Friday meals included fish sticks.
“Arab-speaking Muslims were part and parcel of the same stories that inform our sense of what the Midwest is and its values are,” said Indiana University professor Edward E. Curtis, IV. “They participated in the making of the American heartland.”
Abdallah Igram is buried in the city’s hilltop Muslim cemetery, among the first in the United States when it was built in the 1940s. It’s next to the Czech cemetery – for the descendants of the migrants who helped establish Cedar Rapids in the 1850s — and the Jewish cemetery, whose operators donated trees to the Muslim one after damage from a derecho five years ago. Smejkal wishes the whole world’s faiths could collaborate this way.
“That’s when there’s no barriers anymore. I pray one day it’s really like that,” Smejkal said.
Being Muslim in the Heartland
The Muslim presence across the Midwest grew exponentially after a 1965 immigration law eliminated the quotas that had blocked arrivals from many parts of the world since the mid-1920s, Curtis said.
Mistrust flared again after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, especially in farming communities whose young people were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, said Ako Abdul-Samad, an African-American who represented Des Moines for nearly two decades in the Iowa House of Representatives. He feared being Muslim would prevent his election when he first ran for office, but voters re-elected him again and again.
Immigration, including from Muslim countries, remains a contentious issue, even as Muslim communities flourish and increase their political influence in major cities like Minneapolis and Detroit.
But daily interactions between Muslims and their neighbors have provided some protection from prejudice, according to the Mother Mosque imam, a Palestinian who immigrated in the 1980s. “Stereotypes and things did not work” in Cedar Rapids, Taha Tawil said.
Bosnian Muslims say they’ve had similar experiences near Des Moines, where a new multimillion dollar mosque and cultural center is opening next month, an expansion of the first center established by war refugees 20 years ago.
“Our neighbors have been great to us, including the farmers we got the land from,” said its treasurer, Moren Blazevic. “We’re finally Iowans.”
Becoming Midwesterners
Faroz Waziri jokes that he and his wife Mena might have been the first Afghans in town when they came in the mid-2010s on a special visa for those who had worked for the US armed forces overseas. After struggling with “culture shock” and language barriers, they’ve become naturalized US citizens, and he’s the refugee resources manager at a non-profit founded by Catholic nuns.
While grateful for the aid and the safety they feel, the Waziris miss their families and homeland. And they fear that cultural differences — especially the individualism Americans express, like when they sit around a table for meals, instead of together on a rug — remain too vast.
“Mentally and emotionally, I never think I’m American,” said Mena Waziri. She’s a college graduate now, and loves the independence and women’s rights that remain unattainable in Taliban-run Afghanistan. But the family is keen for their US-born son, Rayan, to have Muslim friends and values.
These tensions are familiar for the descendants of the city’s first Muslim settlers, like Aossey, who keeps exhibit panels about Lebanese immigration and integration in the same garage where he stores ATVs on his recreational farm.
“My story is the American story,” Aossey said. “It’s not the Islamic story.”
Trump threatens federal intervention in Chicago, government takeover in D.C.
Chicago, other cities do not share D.C.’s federal status
Violent crime has fallen in Washington, Chicago, data shows
Updated 51 min 44 sec ago
Reuters
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Friday he would probably expand his crime crackdown to Chicago, intervening in another city governed by Democrats, and threatened to take full control of Washington, D.C., rather than only its policing.
Saying without evidence that violent crime was out of control in the nation’s capital, Trump deployed D.C. National Guard soldiers and federal agents on the streets last week with a mandate to reduce crime.
“It was horrible and Mayor Bowser better get her act straight or she won’t be mayor very long, because we’ll take it over with the federal government, run it like it’s supposed to be run,” Trump told reporters, referring to Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Recent statistics, which Trump dismissed, show crime has declined in the US capital since a 2023 peak.
Washington is a unique federal enclave, established in the US Constitution and falling under the jurisdiction of Congress, not belonging to any state.
In 1973, Congress passed the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, allowing residents to elect a mayor and council members.
Continuing his off-the-cuff remarks at the White House, Trump mused about extending his efforts to other cities. He has declined to explain how the federal government could intervene in local law enforcement in cities outside of the federal enclave of D.C.
“Chicago is a mess,” Trump said, deriding its mayor. “And we’ll straighten that one out probably next.”
Trump said some of his supporters in Chicago have been “screaming for us to come.”
“I did great with the Black vote, as you know, and they want something to happen,” he said. “So I think Chicago will be our next, and then we’ll help with New York.”
As in Washington, crime, including murders, has declined in Chicago in the last year.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said he took Trump’s comments seriously but has not received formal communication from the administration about federal law enforcement or military deployments.
The mayor said Trump’s approach has been “uncoordinated, uncalled for and unsound.” He added: “There are many things the federal government could do to help us reduce crime and violence in Chicago, but sending in the military is not one of them.”
New York City, also criticized by Trump, has reported a steady decline in violent crime in recent decades, and now has a relatively low murder rate among big American cities. Trump also threatened federal government intervention in San Francisco, another city governed by Democrats.
While the Republican president has cast his efforts as an urgent move to help residents feel safe again, Democrats and other critics say he aims to expand the powers of the president beyond the bounds of the Constitution and assert federal control over cities run by Democratic officials.
The US Constitution’s Tenth Amendment generally prevents the federal government from commandeering state or municipal officials and from intervening in states’ legal and criminal justice systems unless citizens’ constitutional rights are being violated.
With no Ukraine peace deal, Trump again threatens Russia sanctions
Russia says agenda ‘not ready’ for Zelensky meeting
Work on Ukraine’s proposed security guarantees underway
Updated 23 August 2025
Reuters
WASHINGTON/KYIV: US President Donald Trump renewed a threat to impose sanctions on Russia on Friday if there is no progress toward a peaceful settlement in Ukraine in two weeks, showing frustration at Moscow a week after his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
“I’m going to make a decision as to what we do and it’s going to be, it’s going to be a very important decision, and that’s whether or not it’s massive sanctions or massive tariffs or both, or we do nothing and say it’s your fight,” Trump said.
He was unhappy about Russia’s deadly strike on a factory in Ukraine this week, he said.
“I’m not happy about it, and I’m not happy about anything having to do with that war,” Trump told reporters at the White House.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, said on Friday that Russia was doing everything it could to prevent a meeting between him and Putin, while Russia’s foreign minister said the agenda for such a meeting was not ready.
Zelensky has repeatedly called for Putin to meet him, saying it is the only way to negotiate an end to the war.
Trump had said he had begun the arrangements for a Putin-Zelensky meeting after a call with the Russian leader on Monday that followed their Alaska meeting on August 15.
Zelensky accused Russia of stalling.
“The meeting is one of the components of how to end the war,” he said on Friday at a press conference in Kyiv with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. “And since they don’t want to end it, they will look for space to (avoid it).”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told NBC there was no agenda for such a summit.
“Putin is ready to meet with Zelensky when the agenda would be ready for a summit. And this agenda is not ready at all,” he said.
The statement echoed Moscow’s established rhetoric about a leaders’ meeting being impossible unless certain conditions were met.
Asked for his response to Lavrov’s comments and what the next steps are, Trump told reporters earlier on Friday: “Well, we’ll see. We’re going to see if Putin and Zelensky will be working together. It’s like oil and vinegar a little bit.”
‘He may be coming’
Trump had taken sanctions off the table in preparation for his summit in Anchorage with Putin. But at the same White House event where he mentioned possible sanctions, he showed a photograph of his meeting with Putin on the red carpet in Alaska, saying Putin wanted to attend the World Cup 2026 soccer tournament in the United States.
“I’m going to sign this for him. But I was sent one, and I thought you would like to see it, it’s a man named Vladimir Putin, who I believe will be coming, depending on what happens. He may be coming, and he may not, depending on what happens,” Trump said.
Trump’s comments did not address the fact that Russia was banned from international competitions such as the World Cup after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and has not taken part in qualification for the 2026 tournament, which will be hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico.
During a visit to a nuclear research center on Friday, Putin said Trump’s leadership qualities would help restore US-Russia relations.
“With the arrival of President Trump, I think that a light at the end of the tunnel has finally loomed. And now we had a very good, meaningful and frank meeting in Alaska,” Putin said.
Thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that Russia launched in 2022. Analysts estimate that more than a million soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded and fighting is continuing unabated, with both sides also attacking energy facilities.
Russia has maintained its longstanding demand for Ukraine to give up land it still holds in two eastern regions while proposing to freeze the front line in two more southerly regions Moscow claims fully as its own and possibly hand back small pieces of other Ukrainian territory it controls.
Zelensky meanwhile has dropped his demand for a lengthy ceasefire as a prerequisite for a leaders’ meeting, although he has previously said Ukraine cannot negotiate under the barrel of a gun.
At the press conference with Rutte, Zelensky said they had discussed security guarantees for Ukraine. He said the guarantees ought to be similar to NATO’s Article 5, which considers an attack on one member of the alliance as an attack against all.
Rutte said NATO allies and Ukraine are working together to ensure security guarantees are strong enough that Russia will never try to attack again.
“Robust security guarantees will be essential, and this is what we are now working on to define,” he said.
Spain’s deadly wildfires ignite political blame game
As happened after last year’s deadly floods in the eastern region of Valencia, the fires have fueled accusations that politicians mishandled the crisis
Updated 22 August 2025
AFP
MADRID: As helicopters dump water over burning ridges and smoke billows across the mountains of northern Spain, residents from wildfire-stricken areas say they feel abandoned by the politicians meant to protect them.
A blaze “swept through those mountains, across those fresh, green valleys, and they didn’t stop it?” said Jose Fernandez, 85.
He was speaking from an emergency shelter in Benavente, where he took refuge after fleeing his nearby village, Vigo de Sanabria.
While praising the care he received at the shelter, run by the Red Cross, he gave the authorities “a zero” for their handling of the disaster.
Blazes that swept across Spain this month have killed four people and ravaged over 350,000 hectares over two weeks, according to the European Forest Fire Information System or EFFIS.
Three of those deaths were in the region of Castile and Leon, where Vigo de Sanabria is located, as well as a large part of the land consumed by the fires.
As happened after last year’s deadly floods in the eastern region of Valencia, the fires have fueled accusations that politicians mishandled the crisis.
“They committed a huge negligence,” said 65-year-old Jose Puente, forced to flee his home in the village of San Ciprian de Sanabria.
The authorities were “a bit careless, a bit arrogant,” and underestimated how quickly the fire could shift, he added. He, too, had taken refuge at the Benavente shelter.
“They thought it was solved, and suddenly it turned into hell,” said Puente.
Both men are from villages in the Sanabria lake area, a popular summer destination known for its greenery and traditional stone houses, now marred by scorched vegetation from wildfires.
Spain’s decentralized system leaves regional governments in charge of disaster response, although they can request assistance from the central government.
The regions hit hard by the wildfires — Castile and Leon, Extremadura, and Galicia — are all governed by the conservative Popular Party or PP, which also ruled Valencia.
The PP, Spain’s main opposition party, accuses Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez of having withheld aid to damage regions run by conservatives.
The government has hit back, accusing the PP of having underfunded public services needed to face such emergencies. They argue that these regions refused to take climate change seriously, which fueled the wildfires.
The wildfires have also highlighted long-term trends that have left the countryside vulnerable.
Castile and Leon suffer from decades of rural depopulation, an aging population, and the decline of farming and livestock grazing, both of which once helped keep forests clear of tinder.
Spending on fire prevention — by the state and the regions — has dropped by half since 2009, according to a study by the daily newspaper ABC, with the steepest reductions in the regions hit hardest by the flames this year.
“Everything has been left in God’s hands,” said Fernandez, expressing a widely held view by locals hit by the fires.
Spain’s environmental prosecutor has ordered officials to check whether municipalities affected by wildfires complied with their legal obligation to adopt prevention plans.
In both Castile and Leon and Galicia, protesters — some holding signs reading “Never Again” and “More prevention” — have taken to the streets in recent days calling for stronger action from local officials.
The head of the regional government of Castile and Leon, the Popular Party’s Alfonso Fernandez Manueco, has come under the most scrutiny.
Under his watch in 2022, the region suffered devastating wildfires in Sierra de la Culebra that ravaged over 65,000 hectares.
He has defended the response this year, citing “exceptional” conditions, including an intense heatwave. He has denied reports that inexperienced, last-minute hires were sent to fight the fires.
Jorge de Dios, spokesman for the region’s union for environmental agents APAMCYL, who has been on the front line fighting the fires in recent days, criticized working conditions.
Most of the region’s firefighting force “only works four months a year,” during the summer, he said.
Many are students or seasonal workers who participate in “two, three, four campaigns” before leaving.
“We are never going to have veterans,” he said, adding that what was needed were experienced firefighters capable of handling “situations that are clearly life or death.”
