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An 85-year-old priest has had his throat cut by an Islamic fanatic while
saying Mass in a church in Normandy. For people in the West, this is a
scene of almost unimaginable horror. Catholics in particular will be
revolted and profoundly disturbed by a bloody killing perpetrated during
the act of holy sacrifice around which our faith is built.

Catholics in the West, that is. For Catholics and other Christians in
the Middle East, the atrocity at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray is far from
unimaginable. They have been living with this sort of terror for years,
while Western politicians and the liberal commentariat looked away.

If I were to mention the Baghdad church massacre of October 31, 2010,
how many of them would know what I was talking about? Come to that, how
many Catholics are familiar with the details? On that Sunday evening, Mass
in the Syrian Catholic church of Our Lady of Salvation was cut short by
Islamist gunmen who took the congregation hostage, screaming: “All of
you are infidels… we will go to paradise if we kill you and you will go
to hell.”

Holding this year’s summit in a tent in the capital Nouakchott,
Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz said it was “a historic
event that the Mauritanian people have long awaited.” But only a handful of leaders turned up, which pundits said pointed to
the pan-Arab organization’s struggles under the strain of various
regional crises – including the conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and
Libya.

Egypt’s president Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi, along with Saudi King Salman and
his powerful son, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, were
noticeably absent. Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Palestinian president,
Mahmoud Abbas, and the leaders of Tunisia, Algeria and Tunisia also
failed to turn up.

Lebanese Prime Minister Tammam Salam proposed the establishment of safe
“refugee zones,”

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Cardinal Burke, the patron of the Order of Malta

Cardinal Raymond Burke has revealed that his mother was advised to abort him. In a new book-length interview with the French journalist Guillaume
d’Alançon, Cardinal Burke says that when his mother was pregnant with
him, she became seriously ill and a doctor advised her to have an
abortion.

According to Cardinal Burke, the doctor said: “You already have five
children, it is important for you to be in good health so as to take
care of them”. “My parents refused,” says the cardinal, who is now chaplain to the
Order of Malta. “My parents told him that they believed in God and that
Christ would give them the necessary help. My mother gave birth to me,
and everything went well.

“I was therefore quite touched by this question of defending human life, because I could very well have been killed.” In the book, entitled Hope for the World, Cardinal Burke argues that
the “ferocious attack against life today” results from “the distortion
of the sexual act by contraception”, and urges Catholics to defend human
life

By  Jeremy Bender

Turkey was shaken last Friday as a faction of the military tried
unsuccessfully to force President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from
power. The coup attempt failed within a day, and Erdogan was quick to
use the opportunity to solidify his already increasingly
authoritarian rule by
implementing a three-month state of emergency,
temporarily suspending the European Convention on Human
Rights, and
removing tens of thousands of employees from military and
government positions.

And as Turkey continues to takes steps toward increasingly
illiberal democracy, a big winner of the failed coup is Russian
President Vladimir Putin. Anna Borshchevskaya, an Ira Weiner fellow at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy,
writes in The Hill that the coup attempt will force Erdogan
and Putin toward a closer relationship as Turkey moves further
away from the West and its demands for human rights and open
democracy.

by Joseph A. Kechichian, Senior Writer Beirut: Lebanon is a largely paralysed society that is struggling with
basic governance issues, some of which predate the 1975-1990 Civil War,
though the chaos endured by citizens has intensified in the past twenty
years.

Since its creation, Lebanon has had a relatively effective
presidential system through a unique paradigm [a power-sharing system
based along confessional lines].

Then in 1989, the Taif agreement
which ended Lebanon’s bitter civil war shifted that very paradigm into
the hands of the cabinet. The aim of Taif was to return Lebanon to operate under a functioning democracy. The options being toyed with range from federalism to administrative
decentralisation and even the drastic option of dividing Lebanon into
two to three separate countries.

By Reuters

Lebanon’s central bank chief said he will ensure local banks comply
with a US law targeting Hezbollah’s finances, weeks after a bomb attack
at a major Lebanese lender that had begun closing accounts linked to the
militant group.

Riad Salameh told Reuters the US law must be
enforced to keep Lebanon’s banks within the global financial system and
stabilise the hugely indebted economy as neighbouring Syria’s civil war
hits tourism and growth.

“Of course this (law) has created a lot
of tension in the country, and the tension was not good for Lebanon, but
overall we have preserved the objectives that we had in mind,” he said.Passed
in December, the law threatens to bar from the US financial market any
bank that knowingly engages with Hezbollah, designated a terrorist
organisation by the United States. It has led to a standoff between the
central bank and Hezbollah, which views it as a breach of sovereignty.

Salameh
and the US Treasury have repeatedly said the Hezbollah Financing
Prevention Act is not designed to hurt Lebanon’s economy or to unjustly
prevent members of Lebanon’s Shiite community from accessing banking
services.

Lebanese fashion designer Georges Chakra joined prestigious
international fashion houses in showing his fall/winter 2016-17 Couture
collection at Paris Fashion Week. His show was held at the Jardin des
Tuileries in the center of the city last Tuesday. Chakra is one of the
Lebanese fashion designers who for some time now have been producing the
kind of refined haute couture fashion that can compete with the
prestigious international fashion houses on the global stage at Paris
Fashion Week.

Haute couture fashion distinguishes itself as the height of luxury,
with designs being created entirely by hand with obsessive attention to
detail and made from the highest quality if fabrics. They are
custom-made and exclusive.

Natasha Bertrand

Asked why the US hadn’t seen the attempted Turkey coup coming, US
Secretary of State John Kerry responded that the uprising that
left over 200 dead by Saturday morning did “not appear to
be a brilliantly planned or executed event.” Two days later, a much more detailed picture of the
plotters’ effort has come into focus and suggests a
strikingly different view.

Cemalettin Haşimi, a senior adviser to Turkey’s prime
minister, Binali Yıldırım, told The Guardian on Monday that the
coup “was incredibly well organized actually” and “could
have succeeded.” “Sudden moves by the leadership and sudden movement by the people
changed the whole plan,” Haşimi said, referring to Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s
appeal to his supporters on FaceTime that they take to
the streets to protest the coup — and the fact that they
listened.

The pink of jacaranda trees blooming on the pathway, the powdery grey
of ancient stones, the deep blue sky framing Beirut’s turquoise mosque
domes and the white, whipped water down south at Tyre… Wherever I looked
in Elie Saab’s studios, I could see the colours of his country. 

The designer’s poetic vision recalled stories of the “Cedars of
Lebanon” and the “Paris of the Orient” of Beirut’s Sixties heyday, when
the international beau monde would frolic in the bay, before the city
was reduced to rubble and stone – first by war and then by urban
re-development.

Yet I knew that for Elie Saab, Beirut is where his heart is – and
where his seamstresses are – which is why I had come to the Lebanon for a
richer vision of his work.

Image credit: InDigital (left) and @SuzyMenkesVogue

by Vogue – Suzy Menkes “Beirut is the source of my inspiration and I am proud that I myself
am an image of success and progress for my country – that is what
motivates me,” said Elie Saab, 52, as I watched him work on his Paris
Autumn/Winter 2016 Haute Couture collection and on dresses for private
clients. He has indeed become a symbol of hope, with a large and
successful fashion business that has sprung from his native Middle East
and journeyed to the wider world.

The first thing I noticed was a single bird, flitting across a dress,
with the designer re-positioning the application on the lace bodice. By
the time the show took place in Paris, there were flocks of birds
created in sequins that glittered on the chiffon and silken dresses, and
even on the “kiddie couture” – children’s dress-up clothes, shown for
the first time in mother-and-daughter displays on the Paris runway.

Birds in flight? Elie Saab, deliberately or unconsciously, had hit on
the subject that is defining this new millennium: migration. Not least
in the current influx to the Lebanon from war-torn Syria.