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One of Muammar Gaddafi’s sons was kidnapped in Lebanon — and it’s just the latest misfortune for one of Middle East’s most infamous families

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December 12, 2015

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One of Muammar Gaddafi's five surviving children was kidnapped in Lebanon on Friday.

Hannibal Gaddafi, who was the late Libyan dictator's fifth son, appeared in a video broadcast on Lebanese television exhorting Libyan officials to release information about the fate of Musa Sadr, the prominent Lebanese Shi'ite cleric and communal leader who vanished when Muammar Gaddafi invited him to Libya in 1978.

Gaddafi was only held briefly, and freed near the eastern Lebanese town of Baalbek before returning to Beirut, according to the AP.

All Around the World: The most fun and beautiful Christmas trees from the Vatican to the Rockefeller Center

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December 11, 2015

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Catholic Online presents what Christmas trees look like around the world!

Outside the Rockefeller Building in New York a 78-foot tree weighing ten tons can be found (Alamy stock photo).

In America, the Rockefeller Building boasts a 10-ton, seventy-eight-foot-tall Christmas tree decorated with 45,000 lights.

Fun Fact

In 1931, during the depression-era construction of the Rockefeller center, workers decorated a 20-foot balsam fir with "strings of cranberries, garlands of paper, and even a few tin cans," thus starting the tradition of erecting a Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center each year!

Christmas Baobob Tree in Johannesburg South Africa (Pinterest).

In Sandton, Johannesburg, South Africa, the Christmas Baobob Tree can be found at Nelson Mandela Square. The boabab tree is a more realistic option for Africans to use, and in place of delicate glass ornaments, carved wooded beads are often used.

Each Christmas season in Johannesburg is hot, so in place of hot chocolate and egg nog, South Africans indulge in milk tarts and chilled sparkling wine.

What history can teach us about why the ‘genocide’ label matters

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December 11, 2015

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By Matt Hadro

Washington D.C., (CNA/EWTN News).- A U.S. designation of genocide for ISIS’ actions would offer prompt and significant support to the religious minorities it has targeted, said one researcher, warning that history cautions against inaction.

“It is striking what a difference that word makes,” Gregory Stanton, president of Genocide Watch and a research professor at George Mason University, told the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations in his Dec. 9 testimony on Capitol Hill. Stanton’s group studied past use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” in four previous genocides: Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Darfur.

They found that if the term “ethnic cleansing” was used to describe atrocities against an ethnic or religious group, no action was taken to stop the violence. However, if the term “genocide” was used publicly, action was subsequently taken to stop the atrocities.

“The reason why it is so powerful,” he continued, “is that ‘genocide’ actually means the destruction of a people.” He added that it “therefore impoverishes the entire human race,” he added, and is a “crime against the entire future of the human race.”

Belgium’s ethnic divide is ‘ground zero’ for jihadism

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December 10, 2015

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Sara Miller Llana, Christian Science Monitor

The forces that shape capital cities can often be hard to understand – but Belgium's case may stand alone.

Brussels is the de facto hub of the European Union, as well as hundreds of other international organizations. In a country whose 11.2 million people are divided between Dutch speakers in the north and French speakers in the south, it maintains a mind-boggling bureaucracy to accommodate rival groups. It is officially bilingual, even though two-thirds of the population are either foreign or of recent foreign origin.

Brussels, to many observers, serves as capital of either a dysfunctional continent or a tiny nation with outsized political problems. But jolted by the ease with which the perpetrators of the Paris attacks slipped between their homes in Brussels and the French capital, Europeans are now demanding an answer to a very basic question: What is it about Belgium that has given it an equally outsized role in terrorism?