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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.

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Washington (CNN)Ohio Gov. John Kasich says he won't "sit silent" and watch the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion get "ripped out" as Republicans work to repeal the law.

Kasich said 700,000 Ohio residents now receive care who did not before Obamacare became law, including "a third of whom have mental illness and need to be treated or drug treatment, which is a problem throughout the country."

What's your first and last name? Your education and work experience? Do you have recommendations? And are you willing to be a suicide attacker or would you prefer to be a fighter for ISIS?

Germany's interior minister said he believes data in the documents -- described by European media as the names and personal data of tens of thousands of possible ISIS recruits -- could allow authorities to prosecute people who joined ISIS and then returned to their home countries.

If they did not hear from him, they would know that he is dead."

So is Donald Trump secretly recording conversations or not?

On May 12, just three days after he fired James Comey as the FBI director, President Donald Trump tweeted this: "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"Like many of Trump's tweets, this one immediately came to dominate the political conversation. Did he actually have a secret recording system in the White House? If not, why say it? And, like many of Trump's tweets, it produced a chain reaction of events that backfired on Trump. The threat -- I guess that's the best way to describe what Trump did -- of the existence of recordings spurred Comey to pass along memos he had written detailing his conversations with Trump to a friend, with the express goal of them being leaked and, hopefully, triggering a special counsel to be appointed.

The work and pensions secretary Mel Stride caused controversy on Thursday by suggesting over-50s should take up food delivery work, after Deliveroo recorded a 62% increase in couriers over 50 since 2021.

After the controversy – which saw the TUC accuse Stride of “glorifying the gig economy” – the Guardian spoke to Chris, a 57-year-old courier based in London.

“I started riding for Deliveroo in 2019 after a contract ended. I’m just constantly tired. Mel Stride made it sound like you can just log on and find an order, but there’s so much waiting around that you don’t get paid for. Often I’m waiting on my bike an hour for an order. I’ll be sitting there next to 17 other riders. It’s like a waiter or waitress only being paid when they deliver food to the table,” he said.

The history of labor shows that technology does not usually drive social change. On the contrary, social change is typically driven by decisions we make about how to organize our world. Only later does technology swoop in, accelerating and consolidating those changes.

This insight is crucial for anyone concerned about the insecurity and other shortcomings of the gig economy. For it reminds us that far from being an unavoidable consequence of technological progress, the nature of work always remains a matter of social choice. It is not a result of an algorithm; it is a collection of decisions by corporations and policymakers

In the industrious revolution, however, manufacturers gathered workers under one roof, where the labor could be divided and supervised. For the first time on a large scale, home life and work life were separated. People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits of their efforts.

Far from resembling the sometimes dim but dutiful set depicted by Orwell, today’s political elite are strangers to collective interest or public responsibility

Their conduct serves to undermine both the establishment of which they are part and the country they run.

The failure of our governing elite is technical and political, for sure. But it is also moral. They have short-changed the public for so long that they don’t know any different.

Kathy Griffin Loses CNN New Year's Eve Show and Squatty Potty Deal

Kathy Griffin's latest commercial endorsement deal lasted less than three weeks. She's been dumped by Squatty Potty thanks to publication of a photo showing her holding a wax likeness of a severed, bloody head of President Donald Trump.

After it provoked the predictable outrage, Squatty Potty issued a statement late Tuesday that advertising featuring Griffin that went up earlier this month has been suspended.

Her job as a personal assistant at a London architecture firm, where she had worked for two years, was eliminated in September, leaving her looking for work of any kind.

After scores of rejections, and even being wait-listed for a food delivery gig at Deliveroo, she finally landed a two-month contract at a family-aid charity that pays 10 pounds (about $13) an hour.

The scarring effects may linger. “If you’re unemployed earlier on in your career, you’re more likely to experience joblessness in the future,” said Neal Kilbane, a senior economist at Oxford Economics.

“Should we care as a society that a single firm controls half of our most precious cultural commodity and its automation isn’t working right?” asked Christopher Sagers, the author of “Antitrust: Examples &amp; Explanations.”

“People think Amazon’s algorithms are better than they actually are,” Mr. Sagers explained.

Amazon declined to say what percentage of its book sales are done through third parties. (For the entire marketplace it is over half.)

In Robot America, most manual laborers will have been replaced by herculean bots. Truck drivers, cabbies, delivery workers and airline pilots will have been superseded by vehicles that do it all. Doctors, lawyers, business executives and even technology columnists for The New York Times will have seen their ranks thinned by charming, attractive, all-knowing algorithms.

U.B.I., and it goes like this: As the jobs dry up because of the spread of artificial intelligence, why not just give everyone a paycheck?

While U.B.I. has been associated with left-leaning academics, feminists and other progressive activists, it has lately been adopted by a wider range of thinkers, including some libertarians and conservatives. It has also gained support among a cadre of venture capitalists in New York and Silicon Valley, the people most familiar with the potential for technology to alter modern work.

At 52, Stewart has the bouncy energy of a man half his age and, unlike most in the public eye, has an aversion to compliments. If I tell him I liked something about the film, he will immediately deflect the compliment and insist it was all down to Bahari, or the film’s star Gael García Bernal, or the crew

Over time, Stewart has evolved from a satirist to a broadcaster celebrated as the voice of US liberalism, the one who will give the definitive progressive take on a story.

It is a delicious irony that in the world of American TV news, one populated by raging egotists and self-aggrandisers, the person who is generally cited as the most influential is Stewart – a man so disinterested in his own celebrity, he often didn’t bother to collect his 18 Emmys, preferring to stay at home with his family.

now online shopping is muddy and suspicious in a different way—you never really know what you’re buying, or when it will arrive, or why it costs what it does, or even what options might be available to purchase. The problem isn’t the Dash button, but the way online shopping works in general, especially at the Everything Store.

The company appears to give people what they want, including correcting problems when they arise.But a customer-service orientation masks how Amazon has changed consumer expectations and standards as they relate to retail purchases.

That brings us to Germany’s Dash-button ban: It’s difficult to know exactly what the product costs when you press the button to order it. Prices on Amazon sway up and down in mysterious ways, driven by computational pricing models that consumers can never see or understand. If configured to do so, pressing the Dash button can send a notification to the account holder’s smartphone, which can be followed to confirm pricing and cancel the order if desired.

More than three million people filed for unemployment benefits last week, sending a collective shudder throughout the economy that is unlike anything Americans have experienced.

Just three weeks ago, barely 200,000 people applied for jobless benefits, a historically low number. In the half-century that the government has tracked applications, the worst week ever, with 695,000 so-called initial claims, had been in 1982.

The numbers provided only the first hint of the economic cataclysm in progress. Even comparatively optimistic forecasters expect millions more lost jobs, and with them foreclosures, evictions and bankruptcies. Thousands of businesses have closed in response to the pandemic, and many will never reopen. Some economists say the decline in gross domestic product this year could rival the worst years of the Great Depression.

Worse, all that has happened In just three weeks. That’s a rate of about 3.3 percent per week. At that rate, a quarter of the economy is unemployed in another three and a half weeks or so. What happens when a society reaches about 25% unemployment? Usually, it tips into chaos and upheaval. 40%? It implodes into autocracy.

Even wars and earthquakes don’t crater a whole labour force in weeks. We have no experience of such an event, really, in modern history

What do they really mean? As people lose their incomes, so they have to dip into their savings to survive. But the vast majority of Americans have no effective savings. So then people are forced to sell assets. The net result of a tidal wave of unemployment is that people are going to lose their incomes, then savings, then homes.

But it can buy you influence – or influencers, to be precise.

This US administration is establishing new norms of behaviour. Anger and cruelty disfigure public discourse and lying is commonplace. Truth is being chased away. But with your help we can continue to put it center stage.

Influencers must be US residents to apply, and are barred from using profanity, nudity or “overtly negative content”

“Chapo Trap House,” which started in 2016, typically runs between 60 and 90 minutes. Two episodes are released every week, one for free and one for the nearly 38,000 people who pay $5 a month through the crowdfunding site Patreon. It leads to a financial windfall for the self-professed socialists who are harnessing this rage: $168,800 a month from those subscribers alone.

the Sanders campaign maintains a close relationship with the podcast. His senior adviser, David Sirota, and his national press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, have also been on the podcast. At the Iowa show, a Sanders volunteer stood at the door with fliers and pins to hand out and an email list to gather names.

Their followers — on the night in Iowa City more than 700 strong — come to hear them rage for three hours against the student debt, the high rent, the dead-end creative class jobs, and the feeling of hopelessness fighting against a liberal political establishment that seems polite when they are angry.

A leading epidemiologist advising the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated the peak of deaths in the US coronavirus pandemic will be three weeks from now, after which "most of the damage will be done," and says it may be possible to only isolate the vulnerable, allowing many back to work.

Longini's suggestion that US deaths could peak in less than a month will have two possible impacts. First, a sudden surge in deaths risks overwhelming health care systems that are currently struggling to prepare for cases needing intensive care. Secondly and conversely, it could support calls -- echoed by President Trump -- to reduce restrictions on movement in the coming weeks.

Asked if there could be a risk of a relapse when the virus circulated again in the following weeks, he said: "If it were limited, and we continued to protect the most vulnerable, that may be acceptable for now. Also, let's see what happens in the next two-three weeks. We can also keep an eye on China as they begin to relax restrictions there."

When Mike Phelps moved from Detroit to western Kentucky in 2019, he brought his small business, GenDrop, with him.GenDrop rents out generator power for concerts and music festivals. Phelps had already powered nearly 100 special events throughout Michigan, and he hoped to do the same in his new state. But when the pandemic hit, and shows were canceled all over the world, Phelps began bleeding money.

Phelps got a loan from the Small Business Administration, but it was far too small to make a difference. Now he plans to use his $1,400 stimulus check to help keep GenDrop afloat until business picks up.

Since only a day after President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill, people around the country have reported seeing deposits pending in their bank accounts. That money is expected to be made available as soon as Wednesday.

Bigger stimulus checks. More aid for the unemployed, the hungry and those facing eviction. Additional support for small businesses, states and local governments. Increased funding for vaccinations and testing.

The new payments would go to adult dependents that were left out of the earlier rounds, like some children over the age of 17.

Billed as the American Rescue Plan, the package augments many of the measures in Congress' historic $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill from March and in the $900 billion legislation from December,