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.

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.

Poland abandoned a pledge to shelter migrants under a European Union relocation agreement, Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said, shifting her country’s stance a day after suicide bombers killed dozens of people in the bloc’s de-facto capital. Poland’s previous government agreed to host several thousand migrants under a deal forged by the EU’s 28 member states to address the hundreds of thousands of mostly...

Police investigating the mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve claim they were ordered to remove the word “rape” from their initial report. Local officers had produced an internal “important event” memo entitled “rape, sexual harassment, thefts, committed by a large group of foreign people” – the first indication of the scale of the incident which would go on to make headlines around the world.

Eighty-four migrants are missing after their inflatable dinghy sank off the Libyan coast, the International Organization for Migration says. The dinghy was found taking on water in rough seas after the Italian coast guard received a satellite phone call. It diverted the merchant ship to rescue 26 survivors and bring them to Italy. A spokesperson for the coastguard said similar boats used by people smugglers could hold 100-120 people, and were usually full.

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. 

The German government is rushing to integrate hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, offering them language classes and the prospect of work. But in a country known for its matter-of-fact acceptance of public nudity and creative forms of lovemaking, it is also trying to teach the mostly-Muslim migrants about the joy of sex. Operating under the premise that many Syrians...

A campaign to employ police officers of foreign origins regardless of whether they have a German passport or not has been launched in the state of Bavaria. The move is aimed at helping solve crimes involving migrants.

A Swiss village, one of the wealthiest in Europe, has refused to take in its government imposed quota of asylum seekers, voting to pay a fine of £200,000 instead. The residents of Switzerland’s alpine resort Oberwil-Lieli, where there are 300 millionaires among a population of 2,200, voted “no” in a referendum over whether to accept just 10 refugees. Swiss government proposals had outlined a quota across its 26 counties in order deliver on promise to take 50,000 asylum seekers across the country, but Oberwil-Lieli voted by 52 per cent to 48 to reject the refugees.

Speaking to German reporters in the de facto capital of Tibet's exiled government, the Dalai Lama apparently said that "too many" refugees are seeking asylum in Europe. "Europe, for example Germany, cannot become an Arab country," he said with a laugh, according to AFP, which quoted from an interview the spiritual leader gave to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German newspaper. "Germany is Germany. There are so many that in practice it becomes difficult."

Migrants in Germany committed or tried to commit some 69,000 crimes in the first quarter of 2016, according to a police report that could raise unease, especially among anti-immigrant groups, about Chancellor Angela Merkel's liberal migrant policy. There was a record influx of more than a million migrants into Germany last year and concerns are now widespread about how Europe's largest economy will manage to integrate them and ensure security. The report from the BKA federal police showed that migrants from northern Africa, Georgia and Serbia were disproportionately represented among the suspects.

Authorities in the Austrian town of Mistelbach issued a temporary pool ban for refugees following a sexual assault by a “dark-skinned’ man on a 13-year-old girl. "This news was a shock," said the town’s mayor, Alfred Pohl, as quoted by the Heute media outlet. According to Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung, the attack happened on Wednesday afternoon.

How Canadian hockey moms, poker buddies and neighbors are adopting Syrians, a family at a time. One frigid day in February, Kerry McLorg drove to an airport hotel here to pick up a family of Syrian refugees. She was cautious by nature, with a job poring over insurance data, but she had never even spoken to the people who were about to move into her basement.

The tidal wave of refugees that crashed through Germany’s doors last year has long turned to a trickle, but the costs of the inflow will remain a burden on the country for years, budget figures released on Friday showed. The German finance ministry expects to spend €77.6 billion ($86.2 billion) over the next four years feeding, housing and training refugees as well as helping their home countries to stem the flow, according to...

The Würzburg attacker seems to have been a young, lonely, unaccompanied refugee who had radicalized himself. De-radicalization experts in Germany say such people can be particularly vulnerable. Few details are known about the attacker who seriously injured four people on a train near Würzburg on Monday night. According to Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, he was a 17-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan, who had been living in the Würzburg area since March 2015 - first in a home, and more recently with a foster family.

A new report has uncovered a gross discrepancy in U.S. media coverage of European deaths versus Muslim deaths in terror attacks. Media watchdog group FAIR published a quantitative survey Saturday which documents U.S. media coverage of Islamic State group-inspired attacks in Europe and the Middle East, revealing that European deaths are around 1,800 percent more newsworthy compared to deaths in the Middle East.

Germany's federal criminal police have 410 leads on possible terrorists among refugees here, a local newspaper reported on Monday. The Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung newspaper said that compared with 369 leads in mid-May since the beginning of the migrant crisis last year. Investigations have been launched in 60 cases, the newspaper said. It cited federal BKA police as saying they did not currently have any concrete indications of attack plans. "In view of continuing migration to Germany we must assume that there could be active and former members, supporters and sympathizers of terrorist organizations...

Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Wednesday refugees had not brought terrorism to Germany, adding that Islam belonged in the country as long as it was practiced in a way that respected the constitution. More than a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere arrived in Germany last year. The mood towards them has soured after a spate of attacks on civilians last month, including three carried out by migrants. Two of those attacks were claimed by the Islamic State militant group.

Nigeria’s air force said it had killed some senior Boko Haram militants and possibly fatally wounded their overall leader in a raid on the Islamists' northeast heartland.

Germany expects up to 300,000 asylum seekers to arrive this year, less than one-third of the total during 2015's record influx, the Federal Office for Migrants and Refugees (BAMF) said Sunday. BAMF chief Frank-Juergen Weise told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that Germany's healthy economy and improvements to refugee services meant that the country was well-placed to absorb new arrivals, particularly as their numbers have dropped off.