Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at 15, she signed her first record deal.
Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the US. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008.
Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became the US' best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner.
Frustration at Ceres male gang-rape sentence delay
mambaonline.comThe young gay man who was raped by three men in Ceres in the Western Cape is forced to endure another wait as the sentencing of his assailants is delayed again. Rodney Beukes, Austin Fritz and Peter John Adams, reputed to be members of the feared Ford Boys Gang, were found guilty by the Ceres Magistrates Court in October last year of kidnapping and raping the unnamed man.
Said to be one of the few successful prosecutions of male rape, the incident took place as far back as 2017. The survivor, who was 23 when he was raped, testified that he believes that he was targeted because he is gay.
Following an earlier delay, the sentence was set to have been handed down on Monday but was once again delayed. According to Sharon Cox from Triangle Project – which has monitored the trial and provided support to the victim – the magistrate could not proceed with the sentencing because a previously unknown and serious conviction against Fritz when he was a minor had since come to light. “When he was a juvenile he did commit a crime, and he was sentenced as a juvenile; which is why it didn’t show up at first.
And he was sent to a juvenile detention centre at the time,” said Cox. On Monday, the magistrate ordered that all the original documentation concerning the earlier crime and Fritz’s release and parole conditions must be submitted to the court.
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