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Holocaust survivor Jona Laks addresses the UN General Assembly’s annual International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.

Ceremony at the European Parliament to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

Over 1,000 children are forced to seek refuge in underground bomb shelters in Donetsk city due to ongoing violence in eastern Ukraine, UNICEF said on January 27, 2015.

Children in South Sudan.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (right) and his wife Yoo Soon-taek visit the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland in November 2013.

Reacting to the recent escalation of violence in Eastern Ukraine which, in particular, has already lead to heavy casualties among civilians in Donetsk and in Mariupol, PACE President Anne Brasseur reiterated her call on all sides to stop the fighting and respect the Minsk Cease-fire Agreement and Protocol.

Gernot Erler, the German government coordinator for Russia, ended an otherwise standard speech last week, which was otherwise devoted to papering over tensions in Berlin over continuing sanctions and conflict with Russia, with a stark warning that funds from the West should not flow into financing Kiev’s military attack on eastern Ukraine.

Following the attacks in Paris on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket and in Montrouge, what conclusions can we draw? What might our lines of enquiry be in terms of measures to be taken at governmental and legislative level and what kind of action might we contemplate taking in schools, prisons and problem neighbourhoods? Is secularism still a bastion against fundamentalism?

A European-wide debt conference similar to the conference that led to the London Debt Agreement of 1953 that settled the foreign debts of Germany has been proposed by both the Greek Syriza Party and the Independent Greeks, and has been making headlines in the European media.