Fred and Cindy Warmbier filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the North Korean government on Thursday. They have accused the country of torturing and killing their son.

Otto was sentenced to 15 years in prison and hard labour after he was accused of trying to steal a propaganda poster from a hotel for his church during a visit with a China-based holiday tour company.

He ended up spending 17 months in prison before being returned to his family in a vegetative state.

The lawsuit claims Otto was blind, deaf, had a shaved head and a feeding tube, “was jerking violently and howling” and had misaligned teeth when he reunited with his family in Cincinnati, Ohio.

He died on 19th June 2017.

The parents are also suing the secretive state for emotional distress.

Otto’s father said in a statement on Thursday: “Otto was taken hostage, kept as a prisoner for political purposes, used as a pawn and singled out for exceptionally harsh and brutal treatment by Kim Jong Un.

“Kim and his regime have portrayed themselves as innocent, while they intentionally destroyed our son’s life. This lawsuit is another step in holding North Korea accountable for its barbaric treatment of Otto and our family.”

North Korea has denied torturing the student.

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Gary Streeter, who sits on a parliamentary group which monitors North Korea, said an apparent willingness by Kim Jong-Un to surrender his nuclear weapons programme could be a farce.

The Conservative representative for South West Devon told Premier: “We should pray for these talks to become significant.

“Of course, it may be that the North Korean leadership are just posturing but sometimes, when you open the door, you can’t control the forces that then rush through it.”

Earlier on Friday, Kim Jong-Un and Moon Jae-in stood side by side on their countries’ border to announce an agreement to rid their peninsula of nuclear weapons and not return to the tensions of the past.

Mr Streeter added: “We are going to need a time in the future when the people of North Korea will have to find the courage to rise up and overthrow their oppressors.

“I think we should be praying that they find that courage and the inspiration to do that.”

The two leaders each shovelled soil taken from both nations onto the roots of a symbolic pine tree planted on the frontier dividing their two nations.

Open Doors, which smuggles Christian literature into North Korea and has repeatedly warned over many years the nations is the toughest place on earth to be a believer, encouraged people to pray for its heavily-persecuted Church.

Spokesperson, Beth Fuller said: “For the Christians in North Korea to…

Tory Lord Cormack said big colonies of bats were putting thousands of churches at risk of damage from their droppings and urine.

He denied his Bat Habitats Regulation Bill was “anti-bats” and said something had to be done to protect churches and tackle the hygiene risk.

But the move was opposed by both the Government and the Opposition, with peers warning a balance had to be struck to ensure bats could co-exist with church congregations.

Lord Cormack said bats were amazing creatures and it was right they should be adequately protected.

“But it is right too that churches should be protected from incursions that threaten their condition and very purpose.”

Insisting it was a national problem, he cited the example of a church in Lincolnshire which, he said, was not allowed to repair a door because it might block an access route for 900 bats roosting there.

Some churches, Lord Cormack said, were in a “constant battle with bat droppings and urine,” with the stench and hygiene risk affecting weddings and funerals as well as other services.

“We need a sense of urgency,” he said. “Over this weekend tens of thousands of bats will defecate and urinate in over 6,000 churches.”

The Bill would disapply bat protection laws in churches unless there was no “significant adverse impact” and prevent new building without a local bat survey.

Liberal Democrat Lord Redesdale said churches were one of the last sanctuaries for bats after…

Premier Markus Soder said crosses should not be seen as religious symbols but as a “clear avowal of our Bavarian identity and Christian values”.

“The cross is a fundamental symbol of our Bavarian identity and way of life,” Mr Soder said in a statement.

“It stands for elemental values such as charity, human dignity and tolerance.”

However, opponents of the ruling Christian Social Union (CSU) believe Mr Soder’s move is politically motivated ahead of the state’s October elections.

Florian Streibl, parliamentary executive director of the Free Voters told Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper: “I have to say that the cross is too good to be exploited here for partisan games.”

Meanwhile, Jan Korte, leader of the Left party’s parliamentary group in the federal parliament, said: “Why can the CSU never think of anything that brings people together, instead of trying to divide the country at every level?”

Premier Markus Söder has denied that the law, which comes into effect on 1st June, ignores constitutional rules on religious neutrality.

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15-year-old Leah Sharibu was among 110 schoolchildren kidnapped in Nigeria by the terrorist group last month.

She has refused to denounce her faith in exchange for her freedom.

Rev Yunusa Nmadu, CEO of Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) in Nigeria told Premier why the girls were targeted.

“Boko Haram itself means Western education is forbidden so they do everything possible so that they can scare away school-aged children from going to school – especially the girl child,” he said.

The Nigerian government reached a deal with Boko Haram in the early hours of 21st March.

The terrorist organistaion – which has links to the Islamic State – drove into Dapchi with nine trucks and unloaded all of the girls, except the five that died during the kidnaping, and Sharibu.

However, Dr Khataza Gondwe from CSW told Premier mistakes were made by the army when the girls were kidnapped.

She claimed: “On the day the girls were abducted, the army received messages that Boko Haram was on the move towards Dapchi and the army actually moved out of Dapchi and didn’t come back despite repeated messages being sent.”

Sharibu’s mother told local reporters that her daughter’s friends said Boko Haram “tried to convince her but she said she will not convert to Islam.”

She added: “Boko Haram said since she will not convert to Islam she should remain…

Dr Eléonore Cellard noticed Coptic letters faintly behind the Arabic script which prompted her to contact Christie’s auction house, who managed to identify the text as being from the Old Testament’s Book of Deuteronomy.

The artifact sold for almost £600,000 at Christie’s auction house on Thursday – more than five times the guide price.

The “extraordinary” artefact is unique as it dates back to the earliest days of Islam. It is the only known example where passages from the Bible have been recycled so pages could be reused for Muslims’ holy book.

Cellard, a French scholar from Collège de France, told the Daily Mail: “This is a very important discovery for the history of the Qur’an and early Islam.

“We have here a witness of cultural interactions between different religious communities.”

Praising Cellard’s discovery, Christie’s auction house specialist Romain Pingannaud told the Guardian: “Once you know it’s there, you can only see it, it becomes so obvious. We missed it at the beginning.

“It’s fascinating, particularly because it’s the only example where you have an Arabic text on top of a non-Arabic text. And what’s even more fascinating is it is on top of passages from the Old Testament … It shows the contact between communities in the first centuries of Islam; it’s very relevant.”

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