The Guardian: Lebanon is 400 times smaller than the European Union and has 1.2 million Syrian refugees, who have lived through bomb blasts and chemical attacks and are now in illegal tent cities or packed into small apartments. They share their extraordinary stories with photographer Marieke van der Velden and her film-maker husband, Philip Brink […]

catholicherald.co.uk:

Francis raised his concerns about the terrorist threat during an interview with a Portuguese radio stationAs thousands of refugees attempt to reach Europe, Pope Francis has acknowledged the danger of infiltration by ISIS terrorists.

“It’s true, I recognise that, nowadays, border safety conditions are not what they once were. The truth is that just 400 kilometres from Sicily there is an incredibly cruel terrorist group. So there is a danger of infiltration, this is true,” the Pope said during an interview with Portuguese radio station Radio Renascença. He added that “nobody said Rome would be immune to this threat”.

Lydia Ramsey

Just when you thought you’d run out of excuses to add olive oil to pretty much everything, science has given us yet another great reason.

In a study of older women published Monday in the medical journal JAMA, Spanish scientists found that a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra olive oil appeared to help reduce the participants’ risk of breast cancer when compared against two other groups of women on either a low-fat diet or a Mediterranean diet supplemented with nuts. 

The Mediterranean diet is modeled off of foods commonly eaten in countries on the Mediterranean sea. It’s typically high in fruits and vegetables, fish, and whole grains like whole wheat and brown rice.

Richard Hall, GlobalPost

KETERMAYA, Lebanon — There is a small village in the mountains of Lebanon that is hosting more Syrian refugees than all 50 U.S. states combined.

Situated at the southern end of the Mount Lebanon range, Ketermaya is a quiet little place surrounded by patches of farmland. Much of the traffic in the area goes to and from a nearby cement factory.

It isn’t a particularly wealthy town, but the residents here have taken in thousands of refugees fleeing the war in Syria.

"We have a history of welcoming refugees," says Ali Tafesh, a local business owner. "In 2006 we did the same," he adds, referring to the displacement of people caused by Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon that year.

Tafesh has done more than most. When Syrian families started to arrive in the town in the early days of the civil war, he arranged housing for them. When there were no more places left to stay he offered up his own land.

Bassel F. Salloukh

Protests initiated by “You Stink” activists against Lebanon’s garbage crisis and the government’s infamous corruption and dysfunction continue to grow. What insight can this garbage crisis and mounting public frustration provide us about not only the country’s sectarian political system but also broader regional trends?

Political scientists have long debated how best to engineer durable peace and democracy in post-conflict, plural societies. Lebanon is an example of a consociational political system in which the political elites of the various sectarian groups govern based on a predefined but static power-sharing agreement. Recent scholarship on post-conflict power-sharing agreements has highlighted the institutional variations between corporate consociation, which considers sectarian identities unchanging and constitute the main markers of political identity and, alternatively, liberal consociation, which regards political identity as malleable and shaped by institutional design, namely electoral law and federal structure. Consequently, these different power-sharing systems affect the incentive structures driving political identification and mobilization in post-conflict societies in different ways.

Daily Star lebanon, In a news conference with his Lebanese counterpart Tammam Salam at the Grand Serail, the British prime minister said the humanitarian crisis in neighboring Syria increases the burden on Lebanon, emphasizing that the UK will also offer further support to Lebanese security forces to confront extremists along its northeastern border.

By Jack Moore, Newsweek

British Prime Minister David Cameron has visited a Lebanese refugee camp just a mile from the Syrian border, as Europe continues to face the increasing refugee crisis, largely caused by the four-year Syrian civil war.

Cameron traveled by Chinook helicopter to a camp run by the U.N.’s refugee agency in the Bekaa Valley, according to The Guardian newspaper, which lies close to the Syrian border and an area where the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and ISIS are present.

While at the camp, the British leader called for the European Union to focus on helping the refugees in the countries surrounding Syria, such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, who have taken in millions of Syrians fleeing the war between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Islamist rebels.

Colin Campbell

The US Department of Justice on Wednesday announced that a young man from Minneapolis, Minnesota, pleaded guilty to charges related to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL

But the man, who prosecutors identified as 19-year-old Hanad Musse, was hardly the only Twin Cities resident to face charges in recent months for allegedly supporting the extremist group.

There have been a string of Islamic State-related arrests over roughly the last year.

Why Minneapolis? Authorities say it’s linked to Minneapolis-St. Paul’s large Somali community.

According to The New York Times, estimates peg the local Somali population, which Minneapolis touts as the largest in the US, at roughly 30,000 people.

Antoine Lahad, the former commander of the now-defunct South Lebanon Army, died in Paris this week. He was 88. Lahad headed the pro-Israel militia from 1984 until the Israeli withdrawal from its security zone in south Lebanon in May 2000. He took over command of the SLA, succeeding its founder, General Saad Hadad. Hadad founded […]

catholicherald.co.uk

The American Catholic Church “stands ready to help” in efforts to assist refugees fleeing war-torn countries in the Middle East, said the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has said. Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, Kentucky, also that Catholics in the US and “all people of good will should express openness and welcome to refugees fleeing Syria and elsewhere in order to survive”.

Tens of thousands of people from Syria and other countries are “fleeing into Europe in search of protection”, he said, adding that images of those “escaping desperate” circumstances “have captured the world’s attention and sympathy”.