LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Almost 60 million people worldwide were forcibly uprooted by conflict and persecution at the end of last year, the highest ever recorded number, the U.N. refugee agency said on Thursday.
European Union countries failed to reach an agreement on how the 40,000 new refugees arriving in Italy and Greece should be equally split up among the 28-nation coalition to ease the burden on the two southern countries.
Five Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/IL) jihadists attempted to take advantage of the open Akçakale border crossing between Turkey and Syria to escape Kurdish forces in the latter, only to be arrested on the other side by the Turkish government. The ISIS contingent on the Syrian border is in disarray, as Kurdish forces have officially retaken the pivotal town of Tal Abyad.
Prince Zeid Hussein (of the Hashemite dynasty), who currently serves as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, called on Monday for the European Union (EU) to absorb one million refugees from the wars in the Middle East.
Hundreds of people displaced from the Iraqi city of Tikrit started to return home on Monday, three months after pro-government forces recaptured former president Saddam Hussein’s hometown from Islamic State militants.
Days after closing the Syrian border crossing of Akcakale, announcing that there was no more humanitarian need to keep it open, thousands of refugees began bursting through the gate fleeing Islamic State violence, forcing the government to once again open their doors to migrants after taking in more than one million since 2012.
French police have blocked 200 undocumented immigrants, mostly from the African country of Eritrea, from entering French territory at the main border with Italy.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A Minnesota man convicted of threatening FBI agents who were conducting a terror investigation was released from custody Tuesday and his sentencing was postponed as a federal judge weighs whether a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision will affect the case.
The strain of dealing with the massive wave of refugees pouring off the coast of war-torn, ISIS-threatened Libya and flowing across the Mediterranean is proving too much for Italy. A backlash is growing against the migrant wave, although it is unclear what any faction of the Italian body politic, or the wider European Union, is prepared to do to stop it.
SINJAR, Iraq– Yazidi men and women are taking up arms and joining the Peshmerga to help in defeating Islamic State, as thousands of refugees continue to take shelter on Sinjar Mountain, ten months after President Obama declared the mountain had evaded humanitarian disaster.
As thousands of illegal immigrants, mostly from Africa, continue to arrive to Italian shores, tensions are mounting over what to do with them once they arrive.
A court in Catania, Italy, has sentenced 23-year-old Haj Hammouda Radouan to life in prison for manning an illegal migrant ship that capsized in the Mediterranean, killing an estimated 200 people. It is the first such sentence in Italy’s history, a precedent arriving just as the nation prepares for the summer rise in African migrants attempting to reach European shores.
Turkish authorities in the Muğla province kicked out 40 Syrians after business owners and tourism companies complained about the massive hordes of people in the park.
So thoroughly have decades of Democrat rule annihilated the city of Detroit that most big-picture suggestions for saving the city involve literally giving it away. Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, long ago proposed repopulating the city with immigrants. Now Stanford University poli-sci professor David D. Laitin and former New York City Housing Development Corporation president Marc Jahr offer a more specific suggestion, in a New York Times editorial: give Detroit to refugees from the Syrian civil war.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking in Albania on Wednesday, called for Europe to accept more refugees, particularly those fleeing from the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Erdogan called this a “duty” Europe should be held accountable for.
Over 11,000 Nigerians have returned from Niger since fleeing radical Islamist group Boko Haram. The majority of those fleeing previously lived in areas Boko Haram terrorized the most.
In the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt, the owner of the Amadeus nightclub — identified in Deutsche Welle’s story only as “Martin T.,” as if that would somehow preserve his anonymity — decided to ban “refugees” from his establishment after a series of altercations between the refugees and customers.
According to a U.N.-endorsed report from the Norwegian Refugee Council, 38 million people were displaced by conflicts around the world in 2014, including 2.2 million Iraqis forced from their homes by the rise of the Islamic State.
A video has surfaced on Facebook of a group of about 12 Cuban refugees halfway through their voyage to Miami on a tiny motorboat, displaying their rudimentary navigation technology and hoping to make it ashore in America “with luck.”
Following the European Union’s emergency summit on the Libyan refugee crisis, French President Francois Hollande announced he would seek a United Nations resolution authorizing the destruction of smuggling vessels.
The European Union’s summit to deal with the Mediterranean refugee crisis is underway, and based on leaked documents, it appears a major component of the strategy will involve returning most migrants to their countries of origin.
More than 350,000 refugees in the United States are on food stamps, according the Congressional Research Service (CRS).
In the wake of a horrible tragedy in the Mediterranean that appears to have drowned over 800 refugees, the European Union called a summit, scheduled to begin on Thursday, to consider options for dealing with the Libyan crisis. According to a report at the Telegraph & Argus, experts are “warning the death toll could reach the tens of thousands as growing numbers of desperate migrants take to the waters in overcrowded and unseaworthy boats.”
Rescue teams in the Mediterranean Sea are giving up hope of finding more than 28 survivors from a vessel that was carrying 850 migrants, as the captain of the ship and one of his crew members are charged by Italian authorities with reckless homicide and engaging in human smuggling activities.
The New York Times writes that Syria’s civil war is “creating the worst global refugee crisis in decades,” and since the nations adjacent to Syria are already struggling to deal with some four million refugees, the United Nations wants the United States and other Western nations to take in 130,000 Syrians over the next two years.
