"For the first time since gruesome accounts of the systematic detention and torture of gay men began leaking out of Russia’s republic of Chechnya..."

"... a young man has gone public with his story," WaPo reports.

Maxim Lapunov, 30, told reporters on Monday that he was demanding justice from the Russian government for the 12 days he spent locked in a blood-soaked jail cell, led out daily with a plastic bag over his head to be beaten by police officers demanding he confess to being gay...

Lapunov, who is ethnically Russian, is the first person to make a formal complaint to Russia’s powerful Investigative Committee challenging a government narrative that the “gay pogrom” in Chechnya never existed because no victims have come forward....

Kadyrov, the powerful head of Chechnya, was installed by Russian President Vladi­mir Putin in 2007 with wide-reaching powers to suppress a militant insurgency in the region. He has built a powerful cult of personality and championed conservative values in the mostly Muslim region.

“If there are any [gays], take them to Canada. Praise be to God. Take them far away from us. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them,” he told HBO in a televised interview in July.

"If we were to start profiling people of 'Middle-Eastern' or 'brown' appearance, jihadists will simply recruit white Muslims from the Caucasus, like the Tsarnaev brothers..."

"... who struck at the Boston Marathon. In fact, al Qaeda has been trying to use our very prejudices against us for many years, which is why Osama Bin Laden recruited a 'white army of terror' from the huge number of converts that joined his cause. If it is only men we profile, jihadists will train women, such as the Chechens did with their Black Widows, or this latest Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino. Astoundingly, male jihadists have even cross-dressed in burkas to avoid capture. If it is any adult of fighting age that we screen for, jihadists have turned to grandmother suicide bombers and even animals laden with explosives."

Wrote Maajid Nawaz, whose Wikipedia page I'm reading after seeing him on TV talking about Brexit.

They said "they were the Boston Marathon bombers and would not kill him because he wasn't American."

Says the driver of the hijacked SUV.

The clear inference is that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were motivated by a specific hatred of Americans... in case you'd been led to think that the Chechen dispute is with Russia.

After all this talk of "dark-skinned" suspects, it seems the Boston bombers were Caucasian.

Literally.

"The costly web cameras put in place in Russia's polling stations to combat fraud served a dual purpose..."

"... giving viewers an unusual glimpse of the lives of people all over the country — from small Chechen villages to Tyumen nightlife and beyond."

Anyone with an Internet connection could rove the land, spying on a range of buildings that work as polling stations during elections — from schools to sanatoriums and even private homes....

In Tyumen, a party at a polling station quickly went viral as the 60th birthday party of a man called Nikolai was caught on camera, complete with slow "sexy" dancing and vodka-drinking toasts to Nikolai's young age....

One of the most widely discussed polling stations was a private house in the village of Meseda in Chechnya, where one of the elections commission officials, a woman in her 50s, could be seen with her husband and baby, with a blue sheet hung up to hide the voting "booth." The baby proved especially popular among viewers and users of Twitter.

"God curse America. We will win. It's just a question of time."

Moussaoui takes the stand:

He noted many relatives of victims wept on the witness stand, then walked past him in the courtroom and looked his way without crying. "I find it disgusting that people come here to share their grief over the death of some other person," he said.

"I'm glad there was pain, and I wish there will be more pain," Moussaoui said. "The children in Palestine and in Chechnya will have pain. I want you to share their pain."...

In a lengthy explanation of why he hates Americans, Moussaoui said Islam requires Muslims to be the world's superpower as he flipped through a copy of the Quran searching for verses to support his assertion. He said one verse requires Muslims "to fight against all who believe not in Allah."

"We have an obligation to be the superpower. You have to be subdued," Moussaoui said. "America is a superpower and you want to eradicate Islam."

He criticized U.S. support for Israel. "Every child who has been killed in Palestine has been killed because of you," he said. Israel is "just a missing star in the American flag," he added.

Much more at the link.