Nigeria: Kidnapped Girls Taken Out of Country

Around 230 teenage girls kidnapped by Islamic extremists in Nigeria earlier this month are still missing and authorities say some of them have been shifted out of the country and forced to marry Boko Haram militants. "Some of them have been taken across Lake Chad and some have been ferried across the border into parts of Cameroon," a local leader tells the BBC, adding that the "grooms" who married the abducted teenagers are keeping them in "a medieval kind of slavery."

Critics accuse the government of not doing enough to rescue the girls, most of whom are ages 16 to 18. The militants have killed more than 1,500 people this year alone, but Nigeria's finance minister tells Reuters that it is an insurgency, not a civil war, and the country can overcome it. "Everybody has now come together and said this is ridiculous, crazy, unacceptable, for our children to go to school and be sleeping in their bed at night and for some people to come and abduct them," she says. (More Nigeria stories.)