Canada's Immigration Minister said the country has reached a significant milestone. Canada has reached its target of resettling 25,000 Syrian refugees, the country’s Immigration Minister John McCallum said Monday. McCallum was at Toronto’s Pearson Airport on Monday to receive the last two flights of refugees arriving under the Canadian government’s $500 million resettlement program, reports the Associated Press.

At least 18 people attempting to reach Greece drowned after their boat sank off the Turkish coast on Sunday, the state-run Anatolian Agency reported. The Turkish Coast Guard, using speedboats and a helicopter, rescued 15 people and recovered 18 bodies in the Aegean Sea near the town of Didim, it said. Efforts continued to find more victims whose nationalities were not given.

In 2008, Ryu En Nam, a North Korean defector, was extradited from Russia and executed. He was tied to the train going back to North Korea. “It was horrible. The train started moving and for as long as he could, Ryu En Nam ran with it,” human rights lawyer Lubov Tataretz said, recalling what a Korean diplomat’s son had told her, a few years after she tried and failed to prevent Ryu En Nam’s extradition. Under a recently signed treaty...

Syria's war has killed more than a quarter of a million people, uprooted over half the population and left much of the country in ruins since it erupted five years ago. Here are some key facts and figures on the conflict: The fighting has left more than 270,000 people dead, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor which relies on a large network of doctors and activist sources across the country.

Thirteen North Koreans working at the same restaurant in a foreign country have defected to South Korea, Seoul officials said Friday. People working in North Korean-operated restaurants overseas have previously defected, but this is the first time multiple workers have escaped from the same restaurant, South Korean Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon Hee told reporters in Seoul. North Korean defections are a bitter point of contention between the rival Koreas.

Slovakian border officials shot and wounded a Syrian refugee when they opened fired at a car carrying migrants from Hungary into Slovakia, authorities have said. The unidentified 26-year-old woman is thought to be in a stable condition after undergoing surgery to remove a bullet from her back, according to a hospital in Dunajska Streda, southern Slovakia. The hospital added it had also treated two other migrants suffering from dehydration. 

A judge has thrown out a lawsuit from Texas which sought to ban Syrian refugees from the state. Federal judge David Godbey said that the plaintiff, Texas Health and Human Services Commission, had failed to state a “plausible claim for relief”. Texas sued the US government and nonprofit organization International Rescue Committee (IRC) in December after it was notified that Dallas was to welcome six refugees - one family - from Syria.

And officials say the migrants were accused of sickening crimes including rapes and child abuse. Now critics say they are concerned that the thousands of Syrians entering Britain each year under resettlement schemes are being allowed to enter the country unchecked. Among those arrested are four Syrian immigrants have been charged after two 14-year-old girls were allegedly sexually assaulted - just yards from Newcastle United's stadium.

A group of Danish parliamentarians won rare access to an Australian offshore detention center where abuse and exploitation are rampant.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have agreed to step up efforts to send asylum seekers with no right to asylum in Europe back to their homelands. "All of us in Europe must work for the repatriation of those who do not have rights [to stay]," Mr Renzi said after a meeting with Ms Merkel.

The thousands of Muslim asylum seekers pouring into Denmark have spawned a backlash, and questions over whether the country has a latent racial hostility at its core.

Some 71 percent of refugees in Germany are overqualified for their work, compared to an EU average of 60 percent, according to a working paper released on Wednesday by the European Commission and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The figures were based on comparing the job requirements for refugees’ occupations to their actual qualifications. But when refugee workers were asked personally whether they felt they were overqualified, 54 percent in Germany said yes, compared to 57 percent EU-wide.

Last Week Tonight covers an inappropriate analogy for the refugee crisis.

Residents in Munich have been enraged by plans for a migrant shelter for teenagers in their neighbourhood, with seven locals taking local authorities to court over the proposal. The wall will be built in the Neuperlach district in the south of the city where authorities say it will protect the residents from the migrant inhabitants and, at four meters, will be higher than the Berlin Wall. But authorities have got cold feet over the barrier, with some officials saying it was larger than they had planned.

Refugees in Berlin have pleaded with their host nation to avoid placing migrants under a blanket of suspicion after police commandos raided their shelter, which had been home to a man arrested over Monday night’s truck attack on a crowded Christmas market. “We are of course worried,” said Ibrahim Sufi, 26, a Syrian living in hangar 7 at the former Tempelhof airport, an imposing structure built by Adolf Hitler to showcase Nazi might and now being used to house migrants. “We are worried about how the German public will view us after this terrorist attack.

It’s just a bus stop in a city in northern Germany.

The United Nations has condemned Donald Trump’s ban on refugees and order to stop Syrians and travellers from six other Muslim-majority countries entering the US amid mounting international anger. The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and International Organisation for Migration called on the new President’s administration to continue offering asylum to people fleeing war and persecution, a right protected by international law. “The needs of refugees and migrants worldwide...

Germany's population grew by some 600,000 last year to reach a record high of 82.8 million people due to the number of asylum seekers who have arrived in the country, the country's Federal Statistics office has said. In a preliminary estimate for 2016, the statistics office said the population had eclipsed the previous record high of 82.5 million recorded at the end of 2002, even though the number of deaths in 2016 exceeded the number of births by between 150,000 and 190,000.

The International Community School has been a fixture in the Atlanta suburb of Decatur for 15 years. It's a public charter school where refugee children learn side by side neighborhood kids. On Monday, when students arrived at school, they were greeted by signs. Dozens and dozens of them planted along the sidewalks. "You are welcome here," said one. "You are loved," said another.

Theresa May was accused of being on the "wrong side of history" last night after a scheme to bring vulnerable child refugees to Britain was shut down. The minister said the government paid local authorities £41,610 per year for each unaccompanied asylum-seeking child aged under 16 and £33,215 per annum for those aged 16 and 17. "The Dubs amendment was created to help the most vulnerable child refugees of all...