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40,000 fleeing Aleppo as battle for Syrian city intensifies, U.N. group says

The battle for Aleppo -- once Syria's commercial heart -- is intensifying, and video has surfaced appearing to show thousands of civilians streaming out of the devastated city

Reports said forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government, crucially aided by Russian air power, have cut the city off from supplies and are advancing.

GOP governors and lawmakers were quick to announce they wouldn't allow Syrian refugees into their states and are appealing for stronger control of U.S. borders.

people who are fleeing Syria are the most harmed by terrorism," Obama said in Antalya, Turkey, at a meeting of the G20. "It is very important ... that we do not close our hearts to these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism."

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee similarly heaped pressure on Ryan, saying in a statement: "Speaker Ryan

Hundreds of ISIS fighters are fleeing Mosul in Iraq and crossing into neighboring Syria as coalition forces close in on the city, a powerful tribal leader in the region says.

dozens of ISIS militants and their families were fleeing the city each day, and crossing into Syria at Ba'aaj, an ISIS-controlled crossing point south of Sinjar.

78 towns liberated, 772 ISIS fighters killed in first week of battle, says operations center

With more than 2 million Syrians already living outside their war-torn country and 1 million more expected to flee in the coming months, there is a growing protection gap. Indeed, a report (PDF) released in November by Harvard University shows that even Canada, which prides itself on being hospitable to refugees, has been systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers. Without a doubt, development-related aid is an important incentive to host countries, and providing sanctuary for vulnerable populations is just as vital, but what refugees need most is a legal status, which can be achieved only through a regional framework of protection and national asylum policies. The Bangkok Principles are a good start because they highlight the commitment among these states to develop a regional framework and national solutions to protect refugees, with the support of the international community. The U.S. must do its part and encourage the Middle East to build on these principles. Syrians deserve an organized and effective framework, and the risk of turning our backs is that Syrians, along with the Palestinians, will be wandering without a homeland. Galya Benarieh Ruffer is the founding director of the Center for Forced Migration Studies at the Buffett Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University and a public voices faculty fellow with the OpEd Project.  The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy. 180401 Join the Conversation Post a new commentLogin   c

Although the cause of Syrians fleeing their homeland today differs fundamentally from the flight of Palestinians in 1948, one crucial similarity is the harsh reception they are experiencing in neighboring countries. The tragedy of the Syrian refugee crisis is palpable in news stories and in the images of those risking their lives in rickety boats on Europe’s shores. More than one-third of Syria’s population has been displaced, and its effects are rippling across the Middle East. For months, more than 1,500 Syrians (including 250 children) have been detained in Egypt. Hundreds of adults are protesting grotesque conditions there with a hunger strike. Lebanon absorbed the most refugees but now charges toward economic collapse, while Turkey will house 1 million Syrians by the year’s end.

The surge of Syrians arriving in urban centers has brought sectarian violence, economic pressure and social tensions. As a result, these bordering countries, having already spent billions of dollars, are feeling less hospitable and are starting to close their borders to Syrians.

Typhoon Melor Slams the Philippines, Sends 725,000 Fleeing

Known locally as typhoon Nona, it made landfall Monday morning on tiny Batag Island in the eastern Philippines.

Initial reports from Red Cross chapters in areas affected by the typhoon indicated "minimal impact so far," but some buildings were damaged, according to International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies spokeswoman Kate Marshall.

Cubans Still Fleeing Castro While They CanIf Cubans try to float to the U.S., they’re sent back. So they take a great circle route overland that eventually funnels them across the M

In the humid heat of Tapachula in southern Mexico, a group of 40 Cubans relax on a sea of mattresses in a migrant shelter usually filled with about 15 Central American migrants.

“Everything is so expensive. If you go to the store to buy something, your salary is not going to be enough,” said José Fernández Márquez. “Cuba doesn’t change. It’s always the same.”

The families of a group of Hong Kong activists who were detained fleeing the city in a speedboat in August called on Chinese authorities to issue verdicts soon after they were tried in a mainland court.

Shenzhen said the trials of 10 of the activists had ended and the verdicts would be announced at another time.

has drawn international attention and become a central issue for pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong.

The heat is unrelenting in the middle of a December day in eastern Sudan. It's hard to find any shade in this arid landscape. It's mostly dust and boulders — and, for now at least, it is the temporary home of tens of thousands of Ethiopian refugees who have crossed the border to flee the fighting in their country.

Last month, the Ethiopian government launched a military offensive against a rebellious regional government. The ensuing conflict has killed hundreds, and almost 50,000 Ethiopians have crossed the country's northwestern border into Sudan. It's a refugee crisis that is straining the humanitarian infrastructure in the country. The United Nations refugee agency has appealed for $150 million to help cope with the situation.

"[Militias] were slaughtering people with knives and machetes," she says.

S military officials expect that senior leaders of ISIS may try to flee Mosul, the capital of ISIS' self-styled caliphate in Iraq, as their control of the city comes under attack from Iraqi forces

ISIS leaders will likely take women and children as human shields, or will pose as refugees leaving the battle for the city, according to those officials

Their targets include IED construction facilities; the sources of ISIS financing, such as oil-related facilities, and also the group's media production entities, such as ISIS' news agency, Amaq, according to US military officials.

Targeted by ISIS, Egyptian Christians Flee Violence

Dozens of Egyptian Christian families fled their homes in the northern Sinai Peninsula on Friday, driven by a targeted campaign of Islamist violence that has killed at least seven people in recent weeks.

The Islamic State affiliate in Sinai is small compared with Iraq or Syria, but it has been increasingly active in recent weeks. It has carried out two rocket attacks on Israel in the past two weeks. There were no reported casualties, and Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said in a newspaper interview that such attacks, while “vexing,” did not pose a major security threat.

Thousands of Syrian civilians have finally been allowed to leave the besieged Damascus suburb of Moadamiya.

The exodus of civilians has been made possible by an apparent relaxation of a blockade by government forces.

The situation has become so desperate that earlier this month Muslim clerics issued a religious ruling allowing people to eat cats, dogs and donkeys just to survive.

86 percent of the households making $500,000 or more that left the city moved to four states with reputations for high taxes. Only 45 percent of the less wealthy households relocated to those states.

only 2 percent of the wealthier households bolted for Florida (compared with 10 percent of households that made less than $500,000, many of them retirees). Just over 4 percent of the wealthier households headed for Texas (as did exactly the same percentage of less wealthy households).

States known for lower taxes, among them, South Dakota, Delaware, New Mexico, Utah, Tennessee, Louisiana, Colorado, Alabama and Wyoming, did not even register on the study’s list of destinations for wealthier New York City movers.

Fleeing ISIS tyranny: Agony of the Yazidis

The faith's roughly 600,000 members are taught that for centuries, they have been persecuted by the majority Muslim population that surrounds them.

Yazidi leaders often say their community suffered 73 massacres and genocides.

Though Mr. Zemmour’s is a work of reactionary nostalgia and Mr. Houellebecq’s a futuristic fantasy, both books have hit the dominant note in the national mood today: “inquiétude,” or profound anxiety about the future.

broadly, concern has grown that the political center is eroding and that extremes are rising in a way reminiscent of the 1930s, along with a sense that France, which prides itself on its republican tradition and strong, centralized state, has ceded too much power to the European Union.

“Houellebecq uses his talent, if I may say so, to exalt or to highlight this aspect of a collective fear that is descending upon us,” the philosopher Malek Chebel, who is Muslim, said on France 2 television this week. “I reproach him for it, all the more so that he is a great writer, and when you are a great writer, you have more responsibilities.”

Pakistan attack: Gunmen kill 19 at Bacha Khan University

One Pakistani Taliban commander said the group had carried out the assault, but its main spokesman denied this.The group killed 130 students at a school in the city of Peshawar, 50km (30 miles) from Charsadda, in 2014.

The attackers struck at about 09:30 local time (04:30 GMT), apparently climbing over a back wall under cover of the thick winter fog.

David Crouch in Copenhagen and Patrick Kingsley in London Tuesday 26 January 2016 12.55 EST Last modified on Tuesday 26 January 2016 14.21 EST Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on Pinterest Share on LinkedIn Share on Google+ Share on WhatsApp Shares 5,011 5011 save-for-later__label sa

The bill presented by the centre-right minority government of the prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, was approved after almost four hours of debate by 81 of the 109 lawmakers present, as members of the opposition Social Democrats and two small rightwing parties backed the measures.

“There’s no simple answer for a single country, but until the world comes together on a joint solution [to the migrant crisis], Denmark needs to act,” MP Jakob Ellemann-Jensen of Rasmussen’s Venstre party said during the debate.

At first, the attack had all the hallmarks of a typical Boko Haram assault. Armed fighters stormed a town on the border with Nigeria, shooting every man they saw.

Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group terrorizing this part of the world, is on the hunt — for food.

After rampaging across the region for years, forcing more than two million people to flee their homes and farms, Boko Haram appears to be falling victim to a major food crisis of its own creation.

In the six days and five nights we were in northeast Syria we heard not a single shot fired, nor saw a single bomb drop.

"The assistance we've received," he said, "has been ammunition for Kalashnikovs, for heavy machine guns, for mortars, but we haven't received any weapons."

ISIS is not just a group of fanatics, it's also a bureaucracy

farmers, agricultural scientists and industry officials say a new threat has been ruining harvests, upending lives and adding to the surge of families migrating to the United States: climate change.

Gradually rising temperatures, more extreme weather events and increasingly unpredictable patterns — like rain not falling when it should, or pouring when it shouldn’t — have disrupted growing cycles and promoted the relentless spread of pests.

Central America is among the regions most vulnerable to climate change, scientists say. And because agriculture employs much of the labor force — about 28 percent in Honduras alone, according to the World Bank — the livelihoods of millions of people are at stake.