A 21-year-old suburban Chicago man awaiting trial on terrorism charges on Tuesday faced new allegations that he attacked a fellow inmate who his attorney says taunted him with a cartoon drawing of the Prophet Mohammed.
At a separate status hearing in his terrorism case on Tuesday, Adel Daoud told a judge he believes there is an elaborate conspiracy against him that includes plans for a trial where “the jurors are Freemasons hired by the judge.”
Daoud faces terrorism charges for allegedly trying to set off a bomb outside a Chicago bar in 2012.
Photo: AP
“My whole case is a hoax,” he told US District Judge Sharon Johnson while standing at a podium in leg shackles, speaking calmly and frequently smiling.
He added that “devil worshipers” were plotting against Muslims as a whole and that “the world was united in a war against Islam.”
A psychological exam is planned for Daoud later this month. His attorney has stopped short of any conclusive assessment of his client’s mental health, but says Daoud requires the kind of counseling he is not getting behind bars.
Photo: AP
Daoud, of Hillside, was arraigned later in the day on five fresh counts, including assault with intent to murder, assault resulting in serious injury and using a makeshift weapon behind bars.
After defense lawyer Thomas Durkin said he did not believe his client was competent to enter a plea on his own, US District Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan registered an automatic not-guilty plea to all counts.
After the two hearings, Durkin told reporters that Daoud’s alleged attack on another inmate at Chicago’s Metropolitan Correctional Center was prompted by the other inmate “drawing of a cartoon that mocked the Prophet Mohammed.”
Durkin said Daoud’s courtroom behavior demonstrates his urgent need for counseling.
“That’s what happens when you lock up immature, misguided 18-year-olds,” he said. “I think it’s sad.”
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS