Pope Francis' historic visit to northern Iraq to hold prayers at& an ancient church destroyed by ISIL "sends a clear message to the world that harmony.
‘Beyond belief’
On 27 January 1945, exactly 76 years ago, the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated.
“What happened there and in many other places where atrocities were committed during the National Socialist period, is and remains beyond belief”, Ms. Merkel said.
She expressed deep shame over the catastrophic killing of millions of European Jews by Nazi Germany – known in Hebrew as the Shoah – and of “the betrayal of all civilized values, perpetrated under the National Socialist regime”.
The German Chancellor emphasized that “it is, and remains, Germany’s everlasting responsibility” to remember the Holocaust and to commemorate the victims: the European Jews, Sinti and Roma, political prisoners and Polish intelligentsia, prisoners of war, resistance fighters, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and “countless other men, women and children, who were humiliated, persecuted, tortured and murdered”.
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Several hundred schoolboys abducted in northwestern Nigeria have been freed, according to local officials. The Nigerian military rescued 344 of the kidnapped children Thursday evening, and the boys were received by the Katsina state governor Aminu Bello Masari at the state capital. His spokesman said that Boko Haram was not involved, but that “bandits” pretending to be in the Islamist terror group were responsible a claim that has yet to be verified.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari tweeted that the return of the boys was “a huge relief to the entire country & international community.” He also asked citizens to let the government do its job, as many Nigerians have become more critical about the country’s worsening security problems.