By Carine El Khazen Hadati : Link newsweekme.com/serving-up/

Article published in Newsweek

Eating disorders can be life threatening. In fact, they are the
deadliest of all mental health disorders: 5 to 20 percent of anorexics
will die from this illness. The causes of eating disorders are numerous
and intertwined; they are usually an interplay of several factors:
biological vulnerability, psychological traits, cultural and social
pressures that usually act as triggers.

Among those triggers, dieting is the number one risk factor for
developing an eating disorder. All eating disorders start with a diet
and 35 percent of occasional dieters progress to pathological dieting
(disordered eating) and as many as 25 percent progress to full-blown
eating disorders.

Who can say that they have never attempted dieting? Perhaps no one!
In our culture, dieting has become the norm. Up to 50 percent of women
are on a diet at any given time. Up to 90 percent of teenagers diet
regularly, and up to 50 percent of younger kids have tried a diet at
some point. Each year, more and more adults are trying to lose weight:
in 2000, 24 percent of American adults were dieting; in 2004, 33 percent
were dieting and in 2015 roughly 50 percent of the American population
is on a diet, with every adult making, in general, four dieting attempts
per year.

By english.ahram.org.eg

Google’s famous doodle on Wednesday celebrates Ounsi el-Hajj, a famed
Lebanese writer, poet and translator who was born in 27 July 1937 and
passed away on 18 February 2014. El-Hajj was one of the most influential Lebanese poets of the second
half of the twentieth century and a key contributor to Lebanon’s
cultural and poetic renaissance.

He also wrote columns for Annahar and Al-Akhbar daily newspapers. Ounsi translated several plays by Shakespeare, Ionesco, Camus and Brecht into the Arabic language.His first poetry collection, Lann (Not), was published in 1960 and sparked controversy because of its style.

Naharnet,

Prime Minister Tammam Salam and the Lebanese delegation
attended the Arab League summit in the Mauritanian capital on Monday but
were not expected to spend the night there, the Associated Press
reported on Monday, shortly after Health Minister Wael Abu Faour
questioned the impoverished African nation’s ability to host top
delegations.

The comments by Abu Faour on a local TV show triggered a
spat between Lebanon and Mauritania, where Lebanese officials were
attacked by journalists and on social media.

“They don’t have the infrastructure and it’s miserable,”
said Abu Faour. “The summit will be held inside a tent,” he added,
apparently comparing it to previous summits that were held in five-star
hotels or luxury conference centers.

The minister later clarified on TV that his statements
were not meant against the people of Mauritania and said he got his
information from a Lebanese delegation that went to inspect where the
summit will be held and where the official delegations will be staying.

catholicherald.co.uk

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 is some confusion over whether Marissa Mayer is staying at Yahoo Mayer refuses to say the Verizon sale was ‘at all’ a failure Her golden parachute will be worth $54.9 million if she […]

catholicherald.co.uk

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.