Suspected Islamic Extremist Ricin Attack Plot Foiled in Germany
An Islamic terrorism plot to launch a deadly attack with the toxin ricin was reportedly thwarted in Germany, prosecutors revealed Thursday.
Authorities said a 29-year-old Tunisian, identified only as Sief Allah H., was taken into custody Wednesday after an investigation uncovered he had procured the materials needed to create ricin in mid-May and even succeeded in creating the toxin earlier this month.
Investigators found the toxin after a search of his apartment in Cologne, federal prosecutors in Karlsruhe said in a written statement.
He procured 1,000 castor bean seeds online as well as an electronic coffee grinder,” they said. The shell of the castor bean plant seed is highly poisonous and can be used to create ricin.
Prosecutors said they are still investigating exactly how the suspect planned to use the toxin, and said he was working on a “biological weapon” attack in Germany.
Prosecutors have not commented on a report by Bild newspaper that American intelligence tipped of Germany investigators. The newspaper also reported the suspect bought bomb-making material and chemicals used in the production of ricin.
If inhaled, ricin causes difficulty breathing and other symptoms. If ingested, symptoms include vomiting, diarrhea, hallucinations and seizures. Initial symptoms of ricin poisoning are most likely to occur within four to 10 hours of exposure.
Bild wrote that the suspect lived in the Chorweiler neighborhood of Cologne with his wife and four children. He supposedly used instructions for the making of a ricin bomb that had been posted online by the extremist Islamic State group.
African Migrants Report Torture, Slavery In Algeria
Dozens of Africans say they were sold for labour and trapped in slavery in Algeria in what aid agencies fear may be a widening trend of abusing migrants headed for a new life in Europe.
Algerian authorities could not be reached for comment and several experts cast doubt on claims that such abuses are widespread in the north African country.
The tightly governed state has become a popular gateway to the Mediterranean since it became tougher to pass through Libya, where slavery, rape and torture are rife.
Amid a surge in anti-migrant sentiment, Algeria since late last year has sent thousands of migrants back over its southern border into Niger, according to the United Nations Migration Agency (IOM), where many tell stories of exploitation.
The scale of abuse is not known, but an IOM survey of thousands of migrants suggested it could rival Libya.
The Thomson Reuters Foundation heard detailed accounts of forced labour and slavery from an international charity and a local association in Agadez, Niger’s main migrant transit hub, and interviewed two of the victims by telephone.
“The first time they sold me for 100,000 CFA francs ($170),” said Ousmane Bah, a 21-year-old from Guinea who said he was sold twice in Algeria by unknown captors and worked in construction.
“They took our passports. They hit us. We didn’t eat. We didn’t drink,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “I was a slave for six months.”
Accounts of abuse are similar, said Abdoulaye Maizoumbou, a project coordinator for global charity Catholic Relief Services. Of about 30 migrants he met who were deported from Algeria, about 20 said they had been enslaved, he said.
In most cases, migrants said they were sold in and around the southern city of Tamanrasset shortly after entering the country, often by smugglers of their own nationality, he said.
Some said they were tortured in order to blackmail their parents into paying the captors, but even when the money arrived they were forced to work for no pay, or sold, said Maizoumbou.
One man told the Thomson Reuters Foundation he slept in a sheep pen and suffered beatings if an animal got sick or dirty.
“They would bring out machetes and I would get on my knees and apologise and they would let it go,” said Ogounidje Tange Mazu, from Togo.
The IOM in Algeria has received three reports this year from friends and relatives of African migrants held hostage and forced to work in the country. “It’s probably just an indication that it is happening. How big it is we don’t know,” said its chief of mission Pascal Reyntjens.
“What happens in Algeria surpasses what happens in Libya,” said Bachir Amma, a Nigerien ex-smuggler who runs a football club and a local association to inform migrants of the risks.
Migrants in Libya are often starved and beaten by armed groups, and there have been reports of “open slave markets” where migrants are put on sale, according to the U.N. human rights office.
Amma said he had spoken with more than 75 migrants back from Algeria, the majority of whom described slave-like conditions.
“NGOs don’t know about this because they’re too interested in Libya,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
In 2016, the IOM surveyed about 6,300 migrants in Niger, most of whom had returned from Algeria and Libya. Sixty-five percent of those who had lived in Algeria said they had experienced violence and abuse, compared to 61 percent in Libya. An estimated 75,000 migrants live in Algeria, the IOM said.
Unrelated, but I posted this video on ‘Maine’, yesterday:
Two Somali immigrants have been charged with welfare fraud in Maine, reports say.
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maine said a federal grand jury indicted Abdirashid Ahmed, 38, of Lewiston and Garat Osman, 32, of Auburn for allegedly getting kickbacks of up to $200 per referral of people to a specific health care provider,” the Portland Press Herald reported this month:
Ahmed solicited kickbacks from a MaineCare provider in exchange for referring beneficiaries to the provider, according to the indictment. Ahmed and Osman also allegedly brought beneficiaries to the provider and served as Somali interpreters during the visits.
The indictment also alleges that the health care provider, identified in documents as “Individual A,” submitted fraudulent bills for interpreting services for patients’ appointments with the provider.
According to court documents, Ahmed is accused of receiving at least $23,700 in kickbacks for referring patients to the health care provider between November 2015 and last December. According to court filings, Osman received nearly $7,000.
The indictment said that the health care provider’s bills indicated that interpreting services were provided for about two hours when the appointments were actually much shorter, usually about half an hour. MaineCare reimburses for interpreting services at a rate of $20 for each 15-minute interval.
“More than two dozen men and women from the Somali community sat in the gallery to show their support for the two men,” the Sun Journal reported when Ahmed and Osman faced charges in court:
Ahmed and Osman were arrested last week, each charged with health care fraud involving MaineCare – Maine’s Medicaid program – and receiving health care kickbacks for more than two years.
Both men are accused of referring MaineCare beneficiaries to an unnamed (in the indictment) health care provider and served as Somali interpreters, according to investigators.
Maine has one of the highest per capita rates of Somali refugee resettlement in the country, behind only Minnesota, which also has recently seen charges of Somali welfare fraud, and North Dakota, as Breitbart News reported in 2016:
Ninety-seven thousand three hundred and eighty-five Somali refugees have been resettled in the United States in the fifteen years since FY 2002, of which 15,710 were resettled in Minnesota, more than any other state in the country, according to the Department of State’s interactive website.
Trailing Minnesota in the top ten states for Somali refugee resettlement since FY 2002 are Ohio (7,551), Texas (7,195), New York (6,169), Arizona (5,682), Georgia (4,113), California (3,731), Missouri (3,246), Massachusetts (3,156), and Tennessee (2,958).
Minnesota also leads the country in the number of Somali refugees resettled over these fifteen years on a per capita basis, with 286.2 Somali refugees resettled per 100,000 residents of the state. (The state’s 2015 population was 5.5 million).
Only two states come close to Minnesota’s per capita Somali refugee resettlement number: North Dakota and Maine.
North Dakota experienced a 131.7 Somali refugee resettlement rate per 100,000 residents (997 refugees over fifteen years in a state with a 2015 population of 756,927).
Maine experienced a 117.9 Somali refugee resettlement rate per 100,000 residents (1,568 refugees over fifteen years in a state with a 2015 population of 1.3 million).
Breitbart News reported this month about allegations in Minnesota that Somali immigrants there were engaged in a $100 million daycare fraud:
A Minnesota State Senate Committee held a special hearing on Tuesday to consider legislation that would stop efforts to “broaden the childcare assistance program” after a local Fox News affiliate broke the story on Monday that Somali immigrants are allegedly running an estimated $100 million daycare fraud scheme paid for by taxpayers.
The Minneapolis Somali community is centered around the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, which are separated by the Mississippi River. The Maine Somali community is centered around that state’s “Twin Cities” of Lewiston and Auburn, which are separated by the Androscoggin River.
Selected Comments:
This is the modern day collection of jizyah, the infidel tax. They come here looking for any and all ways to collect. They aren’t like Democrats. Democrats have become like them.
They are parasites. Lazy, rude, smelly, ungrateful frauds. Send them back
Immigrants once came to this country because they wanted to be part of America, to be American. Muslim immigrants hate this country, they are just here to rape and pillage and steal whatever they can…
Didn’t the Somali “community” just rip off the state of Minnesota for $100-million+ in “child care” scams?
It has come to light that these Somali terrorists living among us have a long list of tactics to steal America’s benefits, but one was revealed by Fox 9 in Minneapolis with an investigation that found that Somalis were using a sham daycare center system to milk the American people out of welfare cash.
During its 5-month investigation into the story, Fox 9 KMS tracked the funding flowing into the daycare center and found it was being sent outside the U.S. Fox also found “dozens” of other fraudulent centers doing the same thing.
But this has been going on for years already and everyone knew it.
In 2015 a Minneapolis woman was charged in a $14 million fraud case. But she fled back to Somali just before trial.
As AlphaNews reported in 2015:
Deqo daycare center, which had three locations in Apple Valley, St. Paul, and Minneapolis was shut down in 2013 due to licensing violations and prosecutors charged husband and wife Ahmed Aden Mohamed and Yasmin Abdulle Ali for bilking the state out of nearly $3.7 million, $3.1 million of which was collected from April 2012-January 2013. The duo had recruited more than 100 parents to enroll their own children in the program.
The number of employed Americans has broken eight records since President Trump took office, but on the not-so-sunny side, the number of Americans not in the labor force also keeps increasing, breaking six records since Trump took office in January 2017.
Last month, a record 95,745,000 Americans were counted as “not in the labor force,” meaning they are not employed and are not seeking a job, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statics. “This category includes retired persons, students, those taking care of children or other family members, and others who are neither working nor seeking work,” BLS said.
With record numbers of people not in the labor force, the labor force participation rate has remained stubbornly low in recent years.
In April, only 62.8 percent of the non-institutionalized, civilian population over the age of 16 was either working or actively looking for work. This compares with an all-time high of 67.3 percent in the first four months of 2000.
In a March 2018 report, the Congressional Budget Office noted that a lower labor force participation rate is associated with lower gross domestic product and lower tax revenues. It is also associated with larger federal outlays, because people who are not in the labor force are more likely to enroll in federal benefit programs, including Social Security.
This past January, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the labor force participation rate will continue to decline over the next 30 years from the current 62.8 percent to 61.0 percent in 2027 and to 59.2 percent in 2047.
According to that report, “The continued retirement of the baby-boom generation is the most important factor driving down the overall participation rate.” The first Baby Boomers — people born between 1946 and 1964 — turned 65 in 2011.
CBO has identified three factors pushing down the participation rate, and three factors pushing it up in future years, as follows:
On the downside:
— First, younger workers who are replacing Baby Boomers in the labor force tend to participate in the labor force at lower rates.
— Second, the share of people receiving disability insurance benefits is generally projected to continue increasing, and people who receive such benefits are less likely to participate in the labor force.
— Third, the marriage rate is projected to continue declining, especially among men, and unmarried men tend to participate in the labor force at lower rates than married men.
On the upside:
— First, the population is becoming more educated, and workers with more education tend to participate in the labor force at higher rates than do people with less education.
— Second, the racial and ethnic composition of the population is changing in ways that increase participation in the labor force. CBO expects Hispanics to make up an increasing share of the population, which would increase the overall labor force participation rate, and it expects non-Hispanic whites to make up a diminishing share, which would decrease the participation rate — resulting, on net, in an increase.
— Third, increasing longevity is expected to lead people to work longer.
President Reuven Rivlin on Tuesday began the first visit of an Israeli head of state to Ethiopia, telling a welcoming party at the airport that he was “returning the visit of the Queen Sheba, and coming on behalf of King Solomon.”
