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VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis has led tens of thousands of people in prayer in St. Peter's Square for Christians and others who have been kidnapped or are victims of other "intolerable brutality" in Syria and Iraq.

The pope on Sunday also appealed for "everyone, in line with their possibilities, (to) act to alleviate the suffering."

More than 220 Syrian Christians were kidnapped last week by the Islamic State group, with no word on their fate.

Francis called for silent prayers for "these sisters and brothers who suffer for their faith in Syria and Iraq." The packed square fell silent for a minute or so.

The pope said he wanted to assure the victims of kidnappings, abuse and other violence that "we don't forget them."

BEIRUT (AP) — The Islamic State group released at least 19 Christians on Sunday who were among the more than 220 people the militants took captive in northeastern Syria last week, activists and a local leader said.

The news provided a modicum of relief to a Christian Assyrian community that has been devastated by the abductions, which saw Islamic State fighters haul off entire families from a string of villages along the Khabur River in Hassakeh province. But fears remain over the fate of the hundreds still held captive. Bashir Saedi, a senior official in the Assyrian Democratic Organization, said the 16 men and three women arrived safely Sunday at the Church of the Virgin Mary in the city of Hassakeh. He said the 19 — all of them from the village of Tal Ghoran — had traveled by bus from the Islamic State-held town of Shaddadeh south of Hassakeh.

The Assyrian Human Rights Network also reported the release, and published photographs on its Facebook page that it said were from Hassakeh showing a crowd dressed in winter coats greeting the returnees.

The photos appeared genuine and corresponded to Associated Press reporting.

It was not immediately clear why the Islamic State group freed these captives.

Saedi said all those released were around 50 years of age or older, which suggests age might have been a factor. The Assyrian Human Rights Network, meanwhile, said the captives had been ordered released by a Shariah court after paying an unspecified amount of money levied as a tax on non-Muslims.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also said a Shariah court had ruled the captives be freed, but the reasoning behind the decision was unknown.

The fate of the more than 200 other Christian Assyrians still in the Islamic State group's hands remains unclear. Most of them are believed to have been taken by Islamic State fighters to Shaddadeh, which is located 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of Hassakeh.

Assyrian leaders and Sunni tribal sheikhs have begun reaching out to the Islamic State group to try to negotiate the release of the captives, activists said.

"We're trying to contact any party that might help. We're working through our friends the tribal sheikhs," said Younan Talia, a senior official in the Assyrian Democratic Organization. "Some friends of Daesh are trying to send messages."

Talia said there has been no response yet. Daesh is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.

The Sweden-based director of the Assyrian Network for Human Rights in Syria, Osama Edward, also said efforts were underway to try to negotiate the captives' release.

The abductions have added to fears among religious minorities in both Syria and Iraq, who have been repeatedly targeted by the Islamic State group. During the militants' bloody campaign in both countries, where they have declared a self-styled caliphate, minorities have been repeatedly targeted and killed, driven from their homes, had their women enslaved and places of worship destroyed.

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Associated Press writers Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, and Ashraf Khalil in Beirut contributed to this report.

ISTANBUL (AP) — A Turkish television station says it has obtained video showing three missing British teenagers at an Istanbul bus terminal before they boarded a bus to a city near Turkey's border with Syria.

A Haber news, which has close ties to the government, released the footage, which it says is of the schoolgirls. Authorities believe they fled England to join the Islamic State extremist group. A Haber cited police officials in its report. But Turkish officials reached by The Associated Press, including an Istanbul police official, would not confirm the authenticity of the video.

A few aspects of the girls' dress in the video appear to match security video stills released by British police of the teens at London's Gatwick Airport prior to boarding a flight to Istanbul on Feb. 17.

A Haber says the two-minute video shows shots of the three girls walking in and out of three separate bus offices over a period of 17 hours on Feb. 17 and Feb. 18 at the terminal in Istanbul's Esenler district. British authorities previously identified the missing girls as Shamima Begum, 15, Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Amira Abase, 15.

MOSCOW (AP) — Moscow police have detained a member of Ukraine's parliament as he was taking part in a march mourning a slain Russian opposition figure. Ukraine's parliament has protested the detention.

The federal Investigative Committee said Alexei Goncharenko was being questioned Sunday about his alleged involvement in a fire that broke out last year in his home city Odessa between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian demonstrators. Dozens died in the fire, including some Russian citizens. The speaker of Ukraine's parliament, Volodymyr Groisman, said the detention was a violation of international law because Goncharenko has diplomatic immunity. The speaker urged Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin to take urgent measures to have the parliament member released.

For many Russians, the Odessa fire remains one of the more painful episodes of the Ukraine conflict.

* Netanyahu arrives in U.S. for speech to Congress
* Kerry doesn't want speech to be a "political football"
* Partisan nature of visit has angered U.S. officials (Adds Netanyahu arrival, Israeli official comments)
By Matt Spetalnick and Dan Williams
WASHINGTON, March 1 (Reuters) - The United States and Israel showed signs of seeking to defuse tensions on Sunday ahead of a speech in Washington by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he will warn against a possible nuclear deal with Iran.
Policy differences over the negotiations with Iran remained firm, however, as Netanyahu arrived in the United States on Sunday afternoon for a speech to Congress, which has imperiled ties between the two allies.
Israel fears that U.S. President Barack Obama's Iran diplomacy, with an end-of-March deadline for a framework accord, will allow its archfoe to develop atomic weapons, something Tehran denies seeking.
By accepting an invitation from the Republican Party to address Congress on Tuesday, the Israeli leader infuriated the Obama administration, which said it was not told of the speech before plans were made public in an apparent breach of protocol.
A senior Israeli official told reporters on Netanyahu's flight that Congress could be "the last brake" for stopping a nuclear deal with Iran.
Saying it was Israel's impression that members of Congress "do not necessarily know the details of the deal coming together, which we do not see as a good deal," the official said Netanyahu in his speech would give a detailed explanation of his objections to an Iran deal.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry reiterated Washington's determination to pursue negotiations with Iran, saying on Sunday the United States deserved "the benefit of the doubt" to see if a nuclear deal could be reached.
Last week, Obama's national security adviser, Susan Rice, said the partisanship caused by Netanyahu's looming address was "destructive to the fabric of U.S.-Israeli ties."
Asked about this on the ABC program "This Week," Kerry said: "The prime minister of Israel is welcome to speak in the United States, obviously. And we have a closer relationship with Israel right now in terms of security than at any time in history."

'POLITICAL FOOTBALL'
He said he talked to Netanyahu on Saturday, adding: "We don't want to see this turned into some great political football." Israel and the United States agreed that the main goal was to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, he said.
The senior Israeli official said the Netanyahu-Kerry conversation "shows the relationship continues."
In remarks on Saturday at Jerusalem's Western Wall, Netanyahu said: "I would like to take this opportunity to say that I respect U.S. President Barack Obama." He added that he believed in the strong bilateral ties and said, "that strength will prevail over differences of opinion, those in the past and those yet to come."
Netanyahu did not repeat those remarks as he departed on Sunday. The Israeli prime minister, who is running for re-election in a March 17 ballot, has framed his visit as being above politics and he portrayed himself as being a guardian for all Jews.
"I'm going to Washington on a fateful, even historic, mission," he said as he boarded his plane in Tel Aviv. "I feel that I am an emissary of all Israel's citizens, even those who do not agree with me, and of the entire Jewish people," he told reporters.
Netanyahu is expected to use his speech to urge Congress to approve new sanctions against Iran despite Obama's pledge to veto such legislation because it would jeopardize nuclear talks.
U.S. officials fear he is seeking to sabotage the Iran diplomacy, and critics have suggested his visit is an elaborate election stunt that will play well with voters back home.
With Obama past the midpoint of his final term, his aides see an Iran nuclear deal as a potential signature achievement for a foreign policy legacy notably short on major successes.
While White House and Israeli officials insist that key areas of cooperation, from counterterrorism to intelligence to cyber security, will remain unaffected, the divide over the Iran talks has shaped up as the worst in decades.
Previously, Israel has always been careful to navigate between the Republican and Democratic camps. The planned address, however, has driven a rare wedge between Netanyahu's government and some congressional Democrats. Some two dozen or more of them plan to boycott the speech, according to unofficial estimates.

IRANIAN ACCUSATION
Speaking in Tehran on Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused Netanyahu of trying to undermine the nuclear talks in order to distract from the Palestinians' unresolved bid for an independent state.
"Netanyahu is opposed to any sort of solution," Zarif said.
Hard-line U.S. supporters of Israel say Netanyahu must take center-stage in Washington to sound the alarm over the potential Iran deal, even at the risk of offending long-time supporters.
But a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the "politicized" nature of his visit threatened "what undergirds the strength of the relationship."
As one former U.S. official put it: "Sure, when Netanyahu calls the White House, Obama will answer. But how fast will he be about responding (to a crisis)?"
Last month, U.S. officials accused the Israeli government of leaking information to the Israeli media to undermine the Iran negotiations and said this would limit further sharing of sensitive details about the talks.
"What the prime minister is doing here is simply so egregious that it has a more lasting impact on that fundamental underlying relationship," said Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel lobbying group aligned with Obama's Iran policy.
Netanyahu will address the influential pro-Israel lobby AIPAC on Monday. Even as he makes his hard-line case against Iran, he is expected to try to keep tensions from spiraling, mindful that Israelis are wary of becoming estranged from their superpower ally. (Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle, Mark Hosenball and Dan Williams in Washington and Ori Lewis in Jerusalem; Editing by Jeffrey Heller, Frances Kerry, Crispian Balmer, Susan Fenton and Eric Walsh)

SEOUL, March 2 (Reuters) - North Korea fired two short-range missiles off its east coast on Monday, a South Korean military official said, a move seen as a protest against annual military exercises between South Korea and the United States that were due to start hours later.

The missiles hit the sea early on Monday morning after traveling for about 490 km (305 miles), the official said.

The firing came on the day when the U.S.-South Korean military exercises were scheduled to begin. The secretive North denounces the drills as a preparation for war.

Pyongyang has escalated its rhetoric against the drills, with a spokesman for its army general staff saying Washington and Seoul "should be dealt with only by merciless strikes."

North Korea frequently tests short-range missiles off its coast as part of military drills.

The United Nations has imposed sanctions banning North Korea from launching longer-range ballistic missiles but not short-range missiles. (Reporting by Ju-min Park; Editing by Paul Tait)

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) — Sierra Leone's vice president has put himself in quarantine following the death from Ebola of one of his security guards.

Vice President Samuel Sam-Sumana is set to become acting president later Sunday when President Ernest Bai Koroma leaves Sierra Leone to attend a European Union conference on Ebola in Belgium. Sam-Sumana will carry out his presidential duties from his home. He is the highest ranking African official to be in quarantine in this Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which is fast approaching a death toll of 10,000. The news highlights the rise of new cases in Sierra Leone, which has experienced a setback in curbing the spread of Ebola.

Sam-Sumana voluntarily decided to quarantine himself for 21 days following the death from Ebola last Tuesday of one of his security personnel.

"This virus has affected thousands of our people and has nearly brought our country to its knees," said Sam-Sumana in a statement on Sunday. "We all have a collective responsibility to break the chains of transmission by isolating the sick and reporting all known contacts, by not touching the dead ... We cannot be complacent. We must work together as a nation to end Ebola now."

Sam-Sumana's dramatic quarantine comes as President Ernest Bai Koroma reinstated restrictions on public movement on Saturday, in response the rise in new cases.

Sierra Leone recorded 18 new cases of Ebola in the week ending Saturday, up from 16 new cases last week. This breaks the trend of declining cases in the country.

Many of the new clusters are related to the capital's fishing industry. In one case a fisherman died at sea in early February and the boat returned his body to shore in Freetown, the capital. Some of the fishermen on the boat then returned to their homes in the shantytown surrounding the fishing wharf, causing new infections.

President Koroma had recently lifted travel restrictions in order to stimulate economic activity, a relaxation criticized as too early by some officials. In response to the rise in new cases, Koroma on Saturday re-imposed restrictions including a nighttime ban on all boats launching from shore and on commercial vehicles off-loading goods in western market areas. Naval vessels will enforce the measures by patrolling the wharves and coastline.

In addition there will be restrictions on ferries and health checkpoints by the police will be strengthened. Public transportation restrictions will be reinstated which limit the numbers of passengers in taxis to two in cars and four at the back of large taxi vans to reduce physical contact between passengers.

The death toll for the current Ebola outbreak has risen to more than 9,600 from more than 23,800 infections mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to World Health Organization figures released Friday.

Liberia, which has had the highest number of deaths, has succeeded in bringing its number of confirmed cases to just a handful and has reopened schools.

Ebola is currently spreading fastest in Sierra Leone. In addition to battling Ebola, Sierra Leone's government last week launched an investigation after an audit showed that nearly one-third of the money it received to fight Ebola, about $5.7 million, was used without necessary receipts.

Hillary Clinton and her close advisers are telling Democratic donors she will enter the presidential race sooner than expected, likely in April, a move that would allay uncertainties within her party and allow her to rev up fundraising.

ATHENS, Feb 26 (Reuters) - Dozens of black-clad protesters clashed with riot police in central Athens on Thursday, smashing shop windows, throwing petrol bombs and burning cars after an anti-government march, the first since the leftist Syriza party took power a month ago.
Around 450 far-left protesters took to the streets of Athens against the newly elected left-right coalition government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, which agreed a deal with EU partners last week to extend an aid program to Athens.
The deal has triggered dissent within Tsipras' own party and accusations by some on the hard left that the government is going back on pre-election promises, including to end a much-hated 240 billion euro EU/IMF bailout program.
After the march, about 50 anti-establishment protesters wearing hoods hurled petrol bombs and stones at police in Athens' central Exarchia district, a Bohemian quarter known as a haunt for artists and left-wing intellectuals.
A small number of shop windows and bus stops were also smashed or damaged during the violence.
The incidents, albeit on a small scale, mark the first public disorder against the leftist government, which was elected on Jan 25 on a promise to write off a chunk of the country's debt and end painful austerity which has helped push one in four Greeks out of work. (Reporting By Vasillis Triandafyllou, writing by Costas Pitas, editing by Andrew Heavens)

DORTMUND, Germany (AP) — Authorities have defused an unexploded World War II bomb close to Borussia Dortmund's stadium after evacuating the area.

Dortmund's city government said the 250-kilogram (550-pound) British bomb was defused Thursday afternoon. The bomb had been unearthed after authorities evaluated aerial photos ahead of planned construction work, and a 250-meter (820-foot) radius around the site was evacuated. Because the stadium was inside the evacuated area, the club relocated the news conference of coach Juergen Klopp ahead of the Ruhr derby against Schalke to another facility.

Unexploded ordnance from WWII is still frequently found in Germany, and that regularly results in temporary evacuations such as Thursday's.

KARKEMISH, Turkey -- If the three Brooklyn men arrested Wednesday on charges of aiding and plotting to join the Islamic State had boarded flights to Turkey, they likely would have made it to Syria with ease.

For a wannabe foreign fighter, the last step of the journey is simple: All it takes to cross from Turkey into Syria these days is a smuggler and about $25.

As the international community rallies to crack down on the Islamic State group and bumps up security at home in the wake of deadly terrorist attacks, Turkey's "jihadi highway" is still as porous as ever. Just last week, three London schoolgirls traveled to Turkey and disappeared into Syria after allegedly messaging a female Islamic State recruiter on Twitter.

Despite Turkey's insistence that it's doing all it can to secure the 500-mile-long border, smugglers, fighters and refugees say that Turkish criminal gangs and bribed Turkish paramilitary police have created an environment where anyone can cross into Syria, for a price.



Refugees and smugglers cross the Syria-Turkey border on April 23, 2013.



"When [the Turks] close one area, they open up another," Jasim Qalthim, a 30-year-old smuggler in this Turkish border town of Karkemish, told The WorldPost. "They could make it harder if they wanted."

The devoted father has lost count of how many people he's smuggled into Islamic State territory. Their faces blur together. But he'll always be haunted by one instance in particular, when he smuggled a young Saudi man into ISIS-held Jarabulus, only to have the man's father show up in Turkey, begging Qalthim to cross the border and bring back his son.

Some smugglers "buy" a particular section of the border for a half an hour at a time from an Islamic State "emir," or prince, who controls the border guards, he says.

"He's originally Turkish -- Abu Ali," Qalthim explained, sitting in his dilapidated home as his children watched Batman on a flickering screen with Arabic subtitles. "All the soldiers are afraid of him. One time, he closed the border for 10 days, just because he was angry. He controls everything. He makes huge money and buys weapons and ammunition for ISIS."

A man who smuggles people into Islamic State territory in Syria stands in front of the window in his home in Karkemish, Turkey.



Qalthim hates the extremist group that has claimed large swaths of Iraq and Syria. But times are tough, and he says his family would go hungry if he didn't work as a smuggler. Plus, the border is so close, and the work so easy.

Turkey insists it has tightened the border and ramped up security, and now checkpoints are commonplace on key roads in southeast Turkey, where armed security personnel stop cars and check trunks for smuggled goods like oil and cigarettes. But attempting to to reel in human smuggling is like cleaning up debris after a nuclear strike, says Turkey expert Aaron Stein, an associate fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute.

Turkey actively facilitated the passage of rebels between September 2011 and March 2014 in order to bolster the fight against Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, he explains, but things changed last spring. The United States got more deeply involved, calling out Turkey on its porous border, and the Islamic State became an unmanageable problem.

"I think [Turkey knows] about the smuggling, but cleaning this mess up may not be possible," Stein said.

"As for the military, if the true extent of the corruption on the border was made public, it would be incredibly embarrassing. You have bent officers taking bribes to let people through a border the whole world is asking Turkey to close. You have ambitious middle men who are profiting on the killing of Syrians."



Turkey for years has asked for more international assistance in dealing with the mass displacement of Syrians on its soil -- they number more than 1,622,000, according to government and U.N. numbers. Extremist fighters are often interspersed in refugee populations. The country blames a lack of intelligence-sharing between countries for why so many foreign fighters and Islamic State supporters slip through the cracks. After Hayat Boumeddiene, the wife of one of the Paris gunmen in last month's attacks, escaped easily from Turkey into Syria, Turkey ardently defended itself from criticism.

"Turkey's only fault is to have a border with Syria," Turkey's Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on an official trip to Berlin in early January. "We need intelligence telling us who is a suspect so Turkey can take precautions."

Turkey's Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Hardline fighters take advantage of the porous border and easily bribed guards. Anas, 20, says he crosses to and from Syria through Turkey's official border crossings with ease, despite not having a passport.

Walking from Turkey's Bab al-Salam border gate in the border town of Kilis, his shoulder-length hair and thick, long beard -- a style often worn by Islamist fighters -- stands out in the crowd of refugees. The young man claims to have fought with the Free Syrian Army, then the Islamic State, and now fights "freelance" for groups like Jabhat al Nusra, also known as Al Qaeda in Syria.

An armed man walks in the Islamic State-controlled Syrian town of Tal Abyad, just across from the Turkish Akcakale border gate, on Jan. 31.



"I bribe the Turkish border guards," he said nonchalantly, without elaborating.

Rami Zaid, a 23-year-old activist in Aleppo, says he crosses once or twice a month, usually east of the Bab al-Salam border gate because, as he says, there isn't much security. He doesn't have a passport either, and unlike Anas, he says, he can't get through official border without one -- so he pays Turkish and Syrian smugglers $25-50 every trip to help him across.

For Abu Hawrain, a 24-year-old Syrian lamb trader turned smuggler, paying off Turkish border guards at the Bab al-Salam crossing is part of the daily routine. The Idlib native says he smuggles roughly 100 people a month to territory on the other side controlled by Free Syrian Army-affiliated fighters and more hardline jihadist groups.

"They don't care about the law," he said of the guards at the border. "They let anyone cross if they have money."

But the official Turkish forces at the gate aren't really the ones controlling the border, Abu Hawrain said. A group of four to five rich and widely fear Turkish "gang" leaders run things in Kilis, according to the young smuggler who says he sees them every day.

"The police are afraid of the powerful men," he continued. "The smugglers pay them directly."

Hawrain says he makes 75 Turkish lira, or $30, per person he smuggles, but he has to shell out the equivalent of $20 to pay off the Turkish gangsters and border guards. Most of what he makes, he doesn't get to keep.

When asked what would happen if he kept all of his earnings, Hawrain shook his head: "They're mafia -- they can do anything."

Zaher Said contributed reporting from the Turkey-Syria border.