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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,"

Verizon has bought Yahoo for $4.83 billion. Here are the headlines: Yahoo’s most critical investor says he’s ‘subdued’ by the deal There …

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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