EGYPT/IRELAND – Dublin teenager Ibrahim Halawa, who is on hunger strike in an Egyptian prison today, has said fellow inmates are being tortured and “crucified”. The 19-year-old has told a caseworker from human rights organization Reprieve that some prisoners were being tied up naked in a crucifix position in the prison’s halls. Others had been electrocuted using pools of water to increase the pain.

Ibrahim’s sister Somaia told the Herald yesterday that his latest letter to his family in Dublin alleges that “experimental torture” is being carried out at the prison. He said he was regularly beaten with rubber bars, and was singled out by one senior guard for particular abuse. “Some prisoners were tied naked in a crucifix position in the prison’s halls, while others had been electrocuted, using pools of water to increase the pain,” he said. He alleges that he had been stripped naked, sexually assaulted, whipped with metal chains and walked upon, and he said he has been held around the clock in a windowless cell with no natural light or fresh air. (INDEPENDENT IRELAND)…[+]

GERMANY – Cologne has beefed up security for the city’s annual carnival, after many women suffered sexual assaults and robberies there on New Year’s Eve. The city in western Germany is putting 2,500 police officers on the streets for the week-long event.

Germany was shocked by the New Year assaults, largely blamed on migrants. More than 100 women were victims, but the full scale only emerged later. Separately, police have arrested three suspected Islamist militants in raids. The two men and one woman detained are among four suspected of links to the so-called Islamic State group. One of those held was being sought by Algerian authorities, and they may have been planning an attack in Germany, police said. Two men – a Tunisian and a Moroccan – have been charged over the Cologne offences. But in total there were 945 complaints to Cologne police after the New Year trouble, 559 of them allegations of sexual assault. Thirty-five suspects are being investigated. German authorities spoke of a new type of crime, in which gangs of drunken men – described as North African – targeted women.(BBC)…[+]

USA – President Barack Obama made his first visit to a U.S. mosque on Wednesday, in an effort to allay the fears of Americans accustomed to pop-culture portrayals of Muslims as terrorists, and to reassure Muslim American youth about their place in the nation. Obama, declaring that attacks on Islam were an attack on all religions, decried the “inexcusable political rhetoric” against Muslims from Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates. “We have to understand that an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths,” he said at the mosque outside of Baltimore, which he said had received threats twice in the past year. “When any religious group is targeted, we all have a responsibility to speak up.”

Trump, the Republican front-runner, called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States after authorities described a California couple who killed 14 people last December as radicalized Muslims inspired by Islamic State militants.(REUTERS)…[+]