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Rich Manhattan moms hire handicapped tour guides so kids can cut lines at Disney World

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PetroSA has suspended a top executive implicated in the R1-billion scandal that is rocking the parastatal.

Everton September, a vice-president in charge of the company’s new oil and gas ventures, was suspended on Tuesday, the Mail & Guardian has confirmed.

September faces questions over his role in PetroSA’s 2012 acquisition of a company with oil acreage offshore of Ghana, where he and former acting chief executive Yekani Tenza allegedly negotiated the price “in reverse” – costing South Africans R162-million extra.

Last month, the M&G exposed questions around this and PetroSA’s ongoing effort to buy out oil company Engen. Allegedly the company overpaid or needlessly risked about R1-billion on the deals.

PetroSA’s chairperson Benny Mokaba resigned on the back of the exposé, after apparently being told to go. And the company then cancelled its R187-million contract with a consultant firm that had been implicated.

The M&G also revealed evidence that kickbacks might have been paid in the Ghana deal.

The Hawks police unit is investigating PetroSA, and a probe by the Central Energy Fund, its holding company, is said to be complete.

Represented value for money

The parastatal and Tenza have defended the extra R162-million he and September agreed to pay for the Ghana acquisition, saying it still represented value for money.

The oil company has admitted to “some deviations from our normal procurement processes”.

On Thursday, PetroSA confirmed September’s suspension: “At its meeting on Tuesday, the PetroSA board resolved to suspend September as a precautionary measure. This is to allow an investigation to take place into various allegations. The suspension is intended to enable the investigation to take place without any possible perception of undue interference.”

September could not be reached for comment.

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A case before the Mississippi Supreme Court could lead to jail time for unintentional pregnancy loss.

Mississippi’s state Supreme Court is currently considering a case that could lead to women being prosecuted for manslaughter if they miscarry or otherwise experience unintentional pregnancy loss, according to a report from Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones.

In 2009, two months after Nina Buckhalter’s pregnancy ended in stillbirth, a Mississippi grand jury indicted her for manslaughter, citing her use of methamphetamine while pregnant as “culpable negligence.” Buckhalter’s attorneys challenged the charge; the Supreme Court hearing began in April and a ruling is expected soon.

Buckhalter’s lawyers, as well as reproductive health advocates in Mississippi and across the country, contend that the charges, in addition to criminalizing countless women, could deter women struggling with drug and alcohol addiction during pregnancy from seeking prenatal care or treatment for substance abuse for fear of being prosecuted and create barriers to safe abortion care.

Sheppard goes on to report:

And while the court has yet to rule in Buckhalter’s case, the circumstances are troublingly familiar: There are already 38 states with “fetal homicide” laws that, as RH Reality Check notes, have been used in 400 cases to criminalize, rather than protect, women after they experience unintentional pregnancy loss.

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“For more then a decade, Hussein Solomon has been desperate in getting government and security agencies to gang up against legitimate Muslim activities in the country.”

...

Speaking to Cii News this morning, Solomon who referred to himself as a practicing Muslim, said he seconded the reports of an Al Qaeda mobilisation within South Africa.

“I think it is imperative that Muslims stand up and say: ‘These people do not speak in our name. This is not my religion, I will not attack the innocent, neither will I allow any member of my faith to attack the innocent on the basis of a complete misinterpretation of the Quraan.”

http://www.ciibroadcasting.com/2013/...africa-expose/

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The bombing of Planet Hollywood also resulted in my quest to understand the phenomenon of terrorism in South Africa.

Unfortunately, my study of terrorism in this country has raised more questions than answers on account of the ambiguous nature of government responses. Frankly, one is unsure whether the ambivalent and contradictory responses from the post-94 Pretoria government emanate as a result of incompetence or of political correctness or a combination of the two.

http://muslimsinafrica.wordpress.com...ssein-solomon/

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Coming to Grips with Islamist Radicalization in South Africa

When discussing issues of radicalization in Africa, commentators often examine the case of Somalia’s Al Shabaab or Al Qaeda’s North African franchise – Al Qaeda in the Arab Maghreb. Very little attention is paid to radicalization amongst South Africa’s Muslim population which comprises a paltry two percent of the total population.

Is radical Islamism spreading in South Africa? The answer has to be an emphatic yes.

One could, of course, look at various publications and websites spewing forth this Islamist rage but one of the most interesting is an interview which Khadija Abdul Qaheeer conducted with Mustafa Jonker, one of the men arrested in a Muizenberg, Cape Town police raid for allegedly attempting to start a terror campaign in South Africa.

Whilst excerpts from the interview are long, it provides fascinating insights into the Islamist mindset:

http://muslimsinafrica.wordpress.com...ssein-solomon/

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While South Africa has a small Muslim population, comprising just 1-2 percent of its population, Islamism has a distinct presence in the country. The country is generally considered peripheral to the global war on terror given its distance from the traditional hotbeds of Islamism, but in recent years both transnational and domestic Islamist groups have been active on South African soil.

Given the nation’s history of political violence, it faces a continued risk of Islamist-inspired violence. There were Islamist attacks in South Africa in the late 1990s and threats of attacks in recent years. Additionally, the country continues to confront significant obstacles that could raise its threat level, including considerable economic and social cleavages left over from the apartheid era, increasing crime rates, and high unemployment rates.1

If not successfully tackled, these factors could contribute to a rise in radicalism and violence. South Africa’s liberal democratic government allows religious groups to be active in the country’s politics. As a result, Islamist inspired political parties and organizations that advocate for Sharia are present in South African society today. While these groups do not enjoy mass support, their presence indicates the potential for Islamist terrorism in South Africa.

http://almanac.afpc.org/South-Africa

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Junaid Dockrat in 2004 worked via phone and email with Al Qaida operations chief Hamza Rabi'a (now deceased) to coordinate the travel of South Africans to Pakistan in order for them to train with al Qaida.

http://www.treasury.gov/press-center...ges/hp230.aspx

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BERLIN — German authorities arrested Monday a 93-year-old alleged former guard at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz on charges of complicity in the mass murder of prisoners.

Prosecutors in the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg said the man was believed to have worked at the camp between autumn 1941 and its closure in 1945.

Authorities declined to release the suspect's name but media reports and the Simon Wiesenthal Center said it was Hans Lipschis, who figures among the Center's most-wanted Nazis and is said to have served in the SS "Death's Head" battalion.

The man, who was detained at his home, "appeared before a judge and was taken into custody", the prosecutor's office in the state capital Stuttgart said in a statement.

"The indictment against him is currently being prepared."

Stuttgart prosecutors confirmed to AFP last month that they were working on a probe launched late last year against a suspect who had worked at Auschwitz.

Lipschis has been living in the Baden-Wuerttemberg town of Aalen and reportedly told the authorities that he worked as a cook, not a guard, in the camp in then occupied Poland.

However prosecutors said the evidence pointed to the fact that the suspect in question had broader responsibilities.

"He took on supervisory duties although he did not only work as a guard," a spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office told AFP.

"We will try to determine concretely when and what he did at Auschwitz."

She said the suspect was not believed to have killed prisoners himself but rather "that he abetted the actions of the perpetrators".

Despite his advanced age, the suspect underwent a medical examination and was determined fit to be taken into custody.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, in its 2013 report, lists Lipschis as its fourth most-wanted Nazi, saying he served in the SS-Totenkopf Sturmbann (Death's Head Battalion) from 1941 until 1945 at Auschwitz, and "participated in the mass murder and persecution of innocent civilians, primarily Jews".

Lithuanian-born Lipschis was granted "ethnic German" status by the Nazis. He moved to the United States in 1956 but was deported to Germanyin 1983 for failing to reveal his SS past, Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported last month.

More than one million people, mostly European Jews, perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau, operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland from 1940 until it was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945.

Germany has broadened the scope of its pursuit of Nazi war criminals since the 2011 conviction of Ukraine-born John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland.

In that case, the court ruled that any role at a death camp amounted to accessory to murder, widening culpability from those found to have personally ordered or committed murders and atrocities.

Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years' prison for complicity in some 28,000 murders. He died at a nursing home last year while freed awaiting an appeal.

Lipschis is among 50 surviving Auschwitz staff who are being investigated in Germany under the broadened culpability rules.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center hailed the move.

"The arrest of Lipschis is a welcome first step in what we hope will be a large number of successful legal measures taken by the German judicial authorities against death camp personnel and those who served in the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units), which together murdered more than three million Jews during the Holocaust," the director of the Center's Israel office, Efraim Zuroff, said in a statement.

However renowned French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld said he had mixed feelings about the news from Germany.
"I am torn between my idea of justice and the necessity to chase down war criminals until they take their last breath," he told AFP.

"You need evidence and documents to incriminate them and I think there won't be any more eyewitnesses to implicate them."

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We call on the ANC councillors to focus on cleaning that municipality of the opposition rot. Their first task is to nullify all the irregular appointments starting with the Municipal Manager who has no qualifications to the lowest level that was irregularly employed. We call on our affiliate SAMWU to work together with the council to identify all those irregular appointments that have plunged that municipality into the brink of bankruptcy.

The opposition gang must also be made to pay for illegally withholding the salaries and benefits of the ANC councillors in the run-up to this crucial election. The R106.00 that is illegally charged to the poor people for the electricity poles must be scrapped with immediate effect.

The experiences of the people of Nama Khoi against the DA led coalition are a taste of the bad governance and high levels of exploitation that they desperately want to introduce in our country. It therefore stands to reason that our people should refuse to be misled into believing that the DA cares for our people as they desperately claim. The high levels of discrimination that took place in that municipality exposé the DA for what they really are, the architects of apartheid that they claim to have fought against.

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