Latest news with #Legionnaire
The Citizen
03-05-2025
- Politics
- The Citizen
SA Legion North Coast Branch executive re-elected
IN A show of great trust and confidence in the leadership skills of the executive committee, members of the South African Legion's North Coast Branch recently voted for the re-election of all incumbent office bearers for the year ahead. At the AGM held on Saturday, April 26, at the Queen Nandi Mounted Rifles (formerly the Natal Mounted Rifles) in Durban, the Legionnaires voted for Clifton Ingle to retain his position as chairperson. He will be seconded by Stephen Schuster, who will continue his role of vice chairperson. Appointed to the newly-created position of communications and liaison is Legionnaire Rupert Meyer who said the role of treasurer will remain with Nicholas Skipworth-Michell, while Lana Skipworth-Michell will act as secretary of the South African Legion's North Coast Branch. He said, 'KwaZulu-Natal regional chairman, Legionnaire Steve Leahy, was in attendance to oversee the official voting-in process and lend his support to the North Coast branch's ongoing efforts. Several civilian guests were also present, and as is tradition, the AGM was followed by a relaxed bring-and-braai social — a staple of the branch's monthly gatherings and a reflection of the camaraderie and community spirit that define the North Coast Legion.' Also Read: SA Legion highlights the significance of Poppy Day The SA Legion, which is the oldest military veterans' organisation in Africa, was established to serve the community in 1921. Through the Royal Commonwealth Ex-services League (RCEL), it is linked with 54 member organisations in 49 countries, 18 of which are in Africa. Meyer said the SA Legion primarily serves the interests of military veterans and their families. 'The South African Legion admits as members those who have served in the forces of the Union/Republic of South Africa, MK, APLA, AZANLA or those of the former TBVC states. Commonwealth veterans, as well as persons sympathetic to the cause of the Legion, are also welcomed in the Legion's ranks,' added Meyer. The Legion believes in giving back to the community and engaging in meaningful projects that benefit society at large. They undertake initiatives such as fundraising for charitable causes, and volunteering. People can help the SA Legion by volunteering their time and skills to support veterans through activities such as mentorship, fundraising, organising events, or joining them. People can also make donations or participate in fundraising initiatives by providing resources and support for the Legion's programmes. For more information on the organisation or to volunteer, contact Rupert Meyer on email: salnc@ For more from Berea Mail, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram. You can also check out our videos on our YouTube channel or follow us on TikTok. Click to subscribe to our newsletter – here At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading!
Daily Mirror
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mirror
Assassin Milorad Ulemek's chilling nickname and disturbing link to TV star's murder
Milorad Ulemek, who was given a chilling nickname, played a leading role in some of the most violent acts in Serbia's recent history and made millions through organised crime Eleven days before Jill Dando was shot dead, Milorad Ulemek made himself available for a "special operation" after being asked to carry out an assissination. The ruthless soldier claimed he was fighting in Kosovo on April 15 1999 when he called his spymaster Radomir Markovic to offer his services. Ulemek, 57, later told a Belgrade court that Makovic had previously asked him to "remove one person who is currently seriously threatening the security of the state". Markovic and Ulemek are serving 40 years in jail for plotting two assassinations for brutal dictator Slobodan Milosevic, who died in 2006 while on trial for war crimes. In 2016, Serbian Ulemek, 56, gave evidence at the trial of four former intelligence officers charged with the murder of newspaper owner Slavko Curuvija. Mr Curuvija was shot dead outside his Belgrade home on April 11, 1999. Jill was killed on April 26. Mr Curuvija had upset Milosevic and the president's powerful wife Mira, a former friend. Like Jill, he was going home when he was ambushed from behind, forced to the ground and shot at close range in the head. Ulemek said he declined the request because he was needed in Kosovo before calling Markovic twenty days into the bombing to say he was available. Nicknamed the Legionnaire, after serving in the French Foreign Legion, Ulemek has played a leading role in some of Serbia's most violent acts. He is reported to have made millions running one of Serbia's top crime gangs and was kingmaker for the first democratic leader, only to plot his murder. Ulemek shot up two nightclubs and was suspected of contact with Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik, who was inspired by "Serb nationalists". Ulemek was born in Belgrade on March 15, 1968, to father Milan, an officer in Josip Tito's Yugoslav People's Army, and Croatian mother Natalija. The school dropout, who hung out with young criminals, reportedly fled Serbia in the 1980s while on the run for a raid on a sports shop in Belgrade. He is said to have lived in London learning English, and then France. Reportedly cleared of murder in Paris after accidentally killing a man in a fight, and under threat of deportation, he joined France's Foreign Legion in 1986. He is believed to have served in Chad and the Middle East. Ulemek was said to have been based in Corsica, and was a sergeant specialising in sniper combat and sabotage. He "deserted" around 1991 to join the Serbian Volunteer Guard, or Tigers, who were fighting in the Yugoslav wars. The paramilitary outfit was set up by warlord Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan. Ulemek is said to have become close to the alleged war criminal who was killed in 2000 - even acting as his best man when he wed pop singer Ceca in 1995. Milosevic's trial at the International Criminal Tribunal heard Ulemek trained volunteers at a base in Croatia. In 1994 he briefly married and took his wife's name of Lukovic. Like Arkan, Ulemek mixed business with war and in the mid-90s he took over Belgrade's Zombi club. But he was said to have infuriated Arkan in 1996 when he became deputy chief of the Jedinica za specijalne operacije (JSO) - a 500-man unit of the Serbian Intelligence Service which acted as Milosevic's guard. A witness described murders carried out by his JSO squad chief in Kosovo in 1999, claiming he killed two unarmed young Albanians in civilian clothes and saw four prisoners forced into a house before it was blown up with grenades. He also said he saw Ulemek in Kosovo twice. McMafia author and Balkans expert Misha Glenny called the JSO a "critical node" where the state partnered organised crime. Ulemek teamed up with mafia boss Dusan Spasojevic who led the Zemun Clan, a major player in the heroin trade. The Legionnaire is said to have earned £8.6million from kidnappings the Clan carried out. By 1999 Ulemek was under the command of head of Serbian security services Radomir Markovic and had become the JSO's de facto commander. He was later convicted of the attempted murder of Vuk Draskovic, injured when a truck smashed into his motorcade in 1999, killing four officials. And in 2000, he plotted the murder of Ivan Stambolic, the ex-Yugoslav president who helped Milosevic rise up the ranks of Tito's communist party. But the dictator turned on his ex-mentor, ordering his murder when Stambolic revealed he planned to run against him. Stambolic was found in a shallow grave in 2003 - shot in the back of the neck. As Serbia rose up against Milosevic after the disappearance of his rival in 2000, Ulemek and the Zemun Clan switched sides to join opposition leader Zoran Djindjic . Ulemek vowed to back Milosevic's democratic opponent in exchange for keeping his job. But the relationship with Djindjic, who sent Milosevic to The Hague, soured a year later when he tried to free Serbia from organised crime. Ulemek was suspended in 2001 for torching a disco and opening up with automatic gunfire. A month later he opened fire in a nightclub. Djindjic was killed by a sniper as he got out of his car in 2003. Ulemek surrendered in 2004 at a Belgrade house shared with his second wife, Aleksandra Ivanovic, mum of three of his four daughters, after apparently hiding in the former Yugoslavia and Canada. In 2007 he and ex-deputy, Zvezdan Jovanovic, were convicted of conspiring with 10 others, most Zemun members, to kill Djindjic. Both got 40 years. It was reported that Ulemek has had three escape bids foiled at Zabela high-security jail and he can request early release in 2030.
The Guardian
22-03-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
‘Putting the unvarnished history out there': art and activism during the Aids crisis
In the 1980s, while the Aids pandemic ravaged the LGBTQ+ population of the United States, then president Ronald Reagan failed to help. He didn't even acknowledge the illness existed until 1985, four years into the outbreak, and research has shown that Reagan's government spent four times as much researching cures for Legionnaire's disease than HIV (in spite of the former having an infection and death rate that was dwarfed by Aids). In the vacuum formed by the failure of official government policy, on-the-ground activism by the LGBTQ+ community was essential. A substantial part of that activism was the Aids quilt. Originally conceived by Harvey Milk intern Cleve Jones, the quilt has gone on to become perhaps the largest community art project ever attempted, and panels are still being added to this day. In part to recognize the ongoing importance of the quilt, and in part to celebrate the activism that led to it in the first place, art exhibition To Love-To Die; To Fight. To Live. comes to New York City's School of Visual Arts. The show, which includes documentary films on the Aids pandemic, archival posters from the 1980s, other artifacts of the era and an exhibition of contemporary art called Witness, pays tribute to the brave individuals who fought Aids when their government failed to, while highlighting how the pandemic is still active and dangerous in the United States. 'I've run into people who don't know what the Aids quilt is,' said Michael Severance, an organizer on the exhibit and operations manager with the School of Visual Arts. He believes that exhibitions like this one are essential ways to to tell the stories of the crisis and to put the history out there, especially for younger generations who did not live through it. Aids is still an ongoing problem, in spite of vastly improved medical options for those who have contracted HIV. Severance shared that the disease is particularly active in US south, and is in fact growing in that region. 'The largest proportion of people dying from Aids in America happens to be in the south,' he said. 'It's particularly bad among African-American men. There are a bunch of projects at the National Aids Memorial in San Francisco where they go in and display the quilt to try and bring education and knowledge around Aids.' Severance pointed out that the roots of the quilt were not about activism but rather memorializing the dead. Because in the beginning Aids primarily impacted communities with less public visibility and less access to resources, there were not as many ways of processing the grief of seeing individuals succumb to the disease. 'I remember losing lots of friends to Aids,' Severance told me, 'but I don't remember going to a lot of funerals.' Thus the quilt provided an important means of remembering the dead, while also building up a community of individuals impacted by the disease, be it by directly suffering an HIV infection or through connections to those who had become infected. From this communal form of grieving came projects bent more toward activism, which the quilt is now largely associated with. The exhibition includes original pieces by groups like art collective Gran Fury, which appropriated commercial language to fight for those infected with HIV, as well as a still from a Super 8 film by noted artist David Wojnarowicz. 'It's become this amazing form of activism and knowledge exchange,' said Severance. Over the years the quilt has grown and grown, from an estimated 12,000 panels in 1989 to over 50,000 today. A large part of the exhibition is sharing that legacy of community-building, art-making and organizing, and teaching people how to emulate it. To that end, a major part of this show will be two day-long quilt-making workshops, where members of the community can participate in creating panels of the Aids quilt. 'The quilt workshops are intended to be a space for people to heal and meet and learn and talk about what has been lost,' said Severance. He added the parallels between the dark days of the Aids crisis and the present-day crises being fomented by the Trump administration are quite apparent. 'There is all this homophobia and misogyny that comes with the disease. Those same classifications of people who were stigmatized for HIV are now again in jeopardy. Back in the day they were talking about internment camps for people with HIV/Aids, now we have Guantánamo being used for immigrants.' Severance believes that the legacy of Aids activism is crucial to this political moment, when trans lives are being erased by president Donald Trump's government, and when support for the broader LGBTQ+ community and communities of color are under assault. He did not expect To Love-To Die; To Fight. To Live., which has been in the works for some time, to be so particularly timely, but that is where he finds himself. 'When we started planning this show, we didn't know where we would be in history at this moment,' he told me. 'With where things are going, it feels very important to me to tell these stories and keep these stories going before they get memory holed or erased.' As ever, breaking through cultural amnesia is key. Although Aids took hold in the US just 40 years ago, so much has happened since then that key parts of the story are not particularly well-remembered. Severance also indicated that in the time since, other infectious diseases – like Covid, Mpox, and even measles – have themselves become parts of community action. 'Right now, for subjects like these, there's nothing more important than putting the unvarnished history out there.' Severance hopes that the history of the Aids crisis continues to inspire and instruct, especially right when so many marginalized communities need forms of hope and resistance. 'We have so much to learn from history still,' he said, 'even as these histories become attacked.' To Love-To Die; To Fight. To Live. is on show at the SVA Flatiron Gallery, New York until 5 April.
Boston Globe
15-03-2025
- Health
- Boston Globe
Mass. health officials investigate case of Legionnaire's disease possibly linked to Needham hospital
Legionnaire's disease is a form of pneumonia caused by the bacterium, Legionella, according to the Mayo Clinic. It is treated with antibiotics. The state routinely investigates reported cases of the disease, according to the department of health. It is a naturally found water-borne organism that is not transmitted person-to-person, and there is no cause for public health concern, officials said. Advertisement Onset of symptoms normally comes two to 14 days after exposure and can include fever, cough, and shortness of breath, officials said. In January 2024, public health officials reported that New Hampshire had two clusters of outbreaks last year. In March 2024, health officials And in June and July, When several cases are linked to a specific location, it could indicate an improperly maintained water system in need of remediation, according to the state department of health. Other possible causes could be spray from a shower, faucet, hot tub or whirlpool or water from a ventilation system in a large building, according to the Mayo Clinic. Advertisement Additional information about Legionnaires' disease is available from Tonya Alanez can be reached at
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Local nursing home resident tests positive for Legionnaires' disease
A resident at a rehabilitation facility in Miami County has tested positive for Legionnaires' disease. [DOWNLOAD: Free WHIO-TV News app for alerts as news breaks] Troy Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center Administrator April Steinberg confirmed the case to News Center 7 on Monday, Feb. 24. Legionnaire's disease is a type of pneumonia that can become serious. TRENDING STORIES: Driver dead, 1 student injured after school bus crash in Shelby County 11-year-old boy & woman mauled in separate dog attacks 'Really remarkable;' Cat survives 3 weeks trapped in sofa during move Someone can get the disease if they breathe in small water droplets containing the bacteria. It is not spread from person to person, but instead from man-made water sources like pipes, showers, and bathtubs. The resident is currently being treated at the facility, according to Steinberg. Troy Rehab has brought in an independent laboratory group to test the water and scan for bacteria throughout the facility. 'If found, we will undertake a treatment plan to disinfect the system, kill any Legionella, and prevent more from growing,' Steinberg said. The facility has instituted several 'best practices' to stop the spread and effect of Legionella. 'These include installing high-filtration water taps in the single affected nursing unit, and mounting high-filtration showerheads throughout the facility. These fixtures extract Legionella and render the water safe for drinking, bathing, cooking, and more,' Steinberg said. The facility has been in contact with the Ohio Department of Health and will continue working with it to protect everyone. As previously reported by News Center 7, a single resident at Troy Rehab tested positive for Legionella, but Steinberg doesn't believe this case is related. We will continue to follow this story. [SIGN UP: WHIO-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]
