Sars reports false, defamatory - lawyer

Johannesburg - The lawyer who laid a complaint against Sars group executive Johann van Loggenberg after their relationship ended has called media reports false and defamatory.

"I take exception to the vulgar nature of the reports and specifically state that the manner in which the reports are written was designed to cast me in a poor light and cause the maximum amount of damage to my good name and reputation," attorney Belinda Walter said in a statement, referring to the media.

"I also place on record that a job offer was withdrawn this morning as a result of your defamatory and false articles."

Beleaguered Jordan quits as ANC MP

Cape Town – The ANC’s Pallo Jordan has offered to step down as a member of Parliament, following the furore over his right to use the title “Dr”.

The Sunday Times last week claimed that Jordan, who has routinely used the title of “Dr”, appears to have never even finished university – despite an official government CV of his suggesting he graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the London School of Economics. Jordan did, however, study at Wisconsin-Madison but did not graduate.

Founder of Paris’s iconic Berthillon ice-cream shop dies

                               Tourists stand in line to buy a Berthillon ice cream on Ile Saint Louis in Paris

Raymond Berthillon, the founder of Paris’s celebrated ice-cream parlour Maison Berthillon, has died aged 90. Since the shop opened 60 years ago, ice-cream lovers from all over the world, including then-US President Bill Clinton, have flocked to it.

A Paris landmark in its own right, “Berthillon is to ice cream what Château Lafitte Rothschild is to wine and Valrhona is to chocolate”, says the Paris section of the French travel guide by Lonely Planet.

There are few who contest the claim. Located in the heart of Paris, the shop has attracted millions of visitors ever since the revered French food critic duo, Henri Gault and Christian Millau, discovered and wrote about “this astonishing ice cream shop hidden in a bistro on the Ile Saint-Louis” in 1961.

Clinton blames Obama’s Syria policy for rise of ISIS

                                       Hillary Clinton during a press conference in Oakland on July 30, 2014

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed the rise of Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria on failures of US policy under President Barack Obama, in an interview published Sunday.

Clinton specifically faulted the US decision to stay on the sidelines of the insurgency against Syria's President Bashar al-Assad as opening the way for the most extreme rebel faction, the Islamic State.

"The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad -- there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle -- the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled," Clinton told the Atlantic.

French military effort against ISIS ‘should focus on Lebanon’

                                                    Lebanese forces near Arsal on the Syrian border last week

France would be better placed supporting efforts against Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS or ISIL) militants in Lebanon rather than on the Kurdish front, specialists told FRANCE 24 on Monday.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Monday wrote to EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton urging the 28-member bloc to “mobilise” to help Iraq's Kurds fight ISIS, which is also known as the Islamic State.

Fabius had just returned from a trip to Iraq where he met Massoud Barzani, head of the autonomous Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

Barzani, Fabius said, had stressed "the urgent need for weapons and ammunition that would allow them to confront and beat the terrorist group Islamic State".