Background

POLAND:

• The issue over the Auschwitz barrack has arisen because of a Polish law aimed at safeguarding a cultural heritage ravaged by past wars, particularly World War II.
• Under the law, passed in 2003, any historic object on loan abroad must return to Poland every five years for inspection.
• While Poland appears open to renewing the loan, it says the barrack must return - at least temporarily.
• Because of the rule, the U.S. museum in recent years has returned thousands of objects dating to the Holocaust, including suitcases, shoes and prosthetic limbs, often in exchange for new loans of similar or identical items.
• The barrack on view in Washington is, in fact, just half of a wooden building where prisoners slept in cramped, filthy and often freezing conditions as they awaited extermination (murder), often in gas chambers.
• The remaining half still stands at Birkenau, a part of the vast Auschwitz-Birkenau complex.
• The two camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau, are about two miles apart but were part of the same machinery of death during the war and the complex is typically referred to simply as Auschwitz.

ABOUT AUSCHWITZ:

• Auschwitz (1940–1945), was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Nazis in Poland during World War II.
• It was the largest of the German concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I (the base camp); Auschwitz II–Birkenau [the extermination (death) camp]; Auschwitz III–Monowitz, also known as Buna–Monowitz (a labor camp); and 45 satellite camps.
• Auschwitz II–Birkenau was designated by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and Germany's Minister of the Interior, as the place of the "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe."
• From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over Nazi-occupied Europe.
• The camp's first commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified after the war at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three million people had died there (2.5 million gassed, and 500,000 from disease and starvation),a figure since revised to 1.1 million, around 90 percent of them Jews.
• Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, some 400 Jehovah's Witnesses and tens of thousands of people of diverse nationalities.
• Those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious disease, individual executions, and medical experiments.
• On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, a day commemorated around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
• In 1947, Poland founded a museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, which by 2010 had seen 29 million visitors—1,300,000 annually—pass through the iron gates crowned with the infamous motto, Arbeit macht frei ("work brings freedom"). (from wikipedia)

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RUSSIA:

• Young Putin supporters also were out on sections of the Garden Ring on Sunday. Wearing heart-shaped red signs around their necks that said, "Putin loves everyone," they handed out similar ribbons in imitation of the protesters. Some passers-by refused to take the pro-Putin ribbons, which had stripes of white, blue and red like the national flag.
• The Garden Ring was the scene of protests on two previous Sundays, when hundreds of people drove cars decorated with white ribbons and balloons as others waved from the sidewalks and overpasses as they went by, horns blaring.
• These demonstrations have helped the protest movement maintain momentum between the huge rallies in Moscow that have drawn tens of thousands of people.
• The protests began in December following a parliamentary election that saw widespread vote rigging to boost the results for Mr. Putin's party. Many Russians already were steaming over Mr. Putin's announcement in September that he and President Dmitry Medvedev intended to swap jobs. The presidential election was presented as a formality.
• No longer willing to tolerate Mr. Putin's system of "managed democracy," the protesters have demanded fair elections in which opposition candidates are free to take part. Some protesters have called for Mr. Putin to step down.

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COLOMBIA - FARC:

• FARC is a guerrilla organization, self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist.  The FARC is considered a terrorist group by the Colombian government, the United States, Canada, the Latin American Parliament, and the European Union. (from wikipedia.org)
• The FARC continues to wage a war of words devoted to Marxist principles, despite the fact that many of its battles are fought with the less idealistic motive of controlling the illicit drug industry. (from tkb.org)
• FARC is responsible for most of the ransom kidnappings in Colombia; the group targets wealthy landowners, foreign tourists, and prominent international and domestic officials. FARC stepped up terrorist activities against infrastructure in cities before Colombia's May 2002 presidential election. (from cfr.org)
  (Read about FARC at cfr.org/publication/9272/.)